A Month With /e/OS

★★★★☆

/e/OS is an open-source Android fork based on LineageOS. They replace some of the default apps with their own, add microG for compatibility, and offer a set of cloud services (which I haven’t tried yet) to fill in for Google’s sync capabilities. It can run on a lot of Android devices, including Google’s own Pixel phones.

Murena is the retail company that runs the cloud features and sells phones with /e/OS pre-installed. They’re also Fairphone’s only US retailer, which is why it’s running on my Fairphone 4.

Fairphone does offer standard Android for their phones, but for now I’m trying to do as much as possible without returning to a full Google system.

Apps and Google

The App Lounge combines extremely basic access to the Play Store and “Open Source apps”, which I believe is the main F-Droid repository. You can use the Play Store anonymously or log in with a Google account. It’s flaky in that mode (it keeps crashing when I try to look at categories), and it doesn’t display (or let you write) reviews, but it will pick up when you’ve paid for an app on your account.

/e/OS also supports microG (Settings->System->App Compatibility), which fills in for basic Google account features like cloud messaging, Play Store services, license/billing checks, etc. My bank apps, as well as Apple Music, Dropbox, Pokémon Go, etc. are all willing to accept device attestation through microG, at least when I’m signed into Google.

Nothing’s complained about the phone being inauthentic so far, and the only app that hasn’t found billing info is Tasks.org (see below)

In-app purchases don’t work, at least not yet, even with the experimental billing support enabled in microG. This appears to be a known problem. (That’s for apps that use the Google Play system, which is going to be most of them. If something has a connection to its own payment system (like if you have a credit card on your Coffee Bean app), it’ll still work.)

ARCore isn’t included, either. The Fairphone 4 isn’t supported at all by the library, though it might be possible to install it manually some devices. So while Pokémon Go runs, it can’t use its AR features.

Launcher

They’ve made the system look like an iPhone as much as you can on an Android device. That includes the launcher (see below), but also the style in apps like mail, music, etc.

Bliss Launcher looks nice, but it’s not very customizable if you want to be able to launch things fast or catch info at a glance. It shows all your apps in a grid (panning to the right for more space). You can rearrange them, and you can create folders, but it always reflows to fill that grid. That means even if you cluster a few apps together visually, that clustering breaks as soon as you add or remove something earlier in the grid order. Widgets are only available as one long column, visible when you pan to the left. I haven’t found a way to rearrange them other than removing everything and adding them back in the order you want. It also doesn’t offer a way to pause notifications for an app for the rest of the day.

I tried Fossify Launcher for a bit more than a month. It’s still buggy and a bit janky, but I could put widgets and icons where I wanted to. Murine Launcher turns out to be a lot more stable (and less janky), while still letting me customize the layout the way I want, so that’s what I’m using now.

Default Apps

The old AOSP keyboard is merely OK. I installed Heliboard, which I’d been using on my previous phone for the past 7 or 8 months, and haven’t looked back. (As of 2026, Heliboard doesn’t have built-in support for gestures yet, but it’s possible to extract or add a swipe library.)

The camera app is pretty good. Automatic settings are fine most of the time, and you can manually set focus, exposure, etc. It can shift seamlessly between lenses on devices that support it (like the Pixel 5), and you can switch manually on devices that don’t (like the Fairphone 4).

One nice thing I haven’t seen with other camera apps is that you can add some features to the floating toolbar…like turning location on and off. I don’t always want geolocation enabled, but I also take a lot of photos for iNaturalist and OpenStreetMap, or when hiking on public trails, and I do want location stored with those. Being able to see at a glance whether it’s on or off, and switch with a tap, is super-convenient.

Tasks is a fork of OpenTasks, which I used to use but switched away from because it’s basically been abandoned. I thought, hey, maybe Murena’s actually maintaining their fork! Well, it doesn’t matter because DAVx5 doesn’t sync with it, so I can’t use it with my Nextcloud server.

Mail is forked from K-9 Mail, which I’ve been using on my old phone, and I figured it was simpler to just install the upstream version and restore my settings.

The built-in Bliss Weather widget is only a widget. There’s no app view other than extremely basic settings (like switching temperature units between Celsius and Fahrenheit). And the smallest size you can set it to on a non-default launcher doesn’t show temperature. I tried a few alternate apps before settling on Accuweather, which includes a small launch-screen widget that actually has key information on it.

Location

I mentioned that the Fairphone 4’s location detection is flaky indoors, and I wasn’t sure how much of that was hardware, and how much was that /e/OS can’t (and probably wouldn’t want to) use Google’s location service and Mozilla Location Service has shut down. These are services that map cell towers and stationary WiFi/Bluetooth points to physical locations, supplementing GPS when the satellite signals are too faint or jumbled to get a fix.

Digging further into this, I found that /e/OS now uses BeaconDB for ground-based location. Apparently MLS exported its cell tower location data, but for (understandable) privacy reasons didn’t release the WiFi data. BeaconDB is crowdsourcing cell signal updates and replacement WiFi locations, with a stated goal of finding a way to obfuscate it so it’s still useful for locating, but not a privacy risk. SailfishOS apparently uses it too, and BeaconDB got an NLNet grant last year, so those are a couple of points in its favor. BeaconDB seems to be a bit lacking in data in my area, though, and I’ve been debating whether I should contribute to the map like I do with OpenStreetMap.

Cloud Services

I haven’t gotten around to setting up a Murena Cloud account. They offer email, storage, calendar, notes and tasks, and an office suite. I have email (lots of it), and I have a Nextcloud server with the rest.

Maybe I’ll give their office suite a try. IIRC it’s built on CryptPad, which seemed pretty good last time I tried it (but didn’t quite fit what I was looking for at the time).

App Compatibility

Overall, most of the apps I’ve installed on it work fine. A few exceptions:

Canon Camera Connect will not sign in without Chrome specifically. Webview? Vivaldi? Nope! This isn’t /e/OS’ fault, but I did have to temporarily install Chrome to be able to set it up. It does work once I’m signed in, and I’ve been able to both send location data to the camera’s photos and pull photos from the camera to the phone.

As mentioned above, ARCore isn’t available.

I had some trouble getting a KeePass file to sync back up to Dropbox when I opened it from the Dropbox app. I’ve since opened it from KeePass2Android instead, and marked the file to keep offline in the Dropbox app, and it’s been working seamlessly like it did on my old phone.

Speaking of KeePass, getting apps and websites to auto-fill has been haphazard. I mean, it wasn’t perfect even on mainline Android, but it seems like I’m falling back to manually copying from KeePass more often on this phone than the older one.

I’ve been using the Tasks.org app to sync with Nextcloud. I couldn’t get it to recognize my subscription (needed to unlock arbitrary CalDAV or DAVx5 support), but since the FDroid version is completely unlocked, I just switched to that source. On the plus side, DAVx5 does sync all my calendars, including the ones still on Google, which means I don’t have to install Google’s calendar app to access them.