The release of mobile platform /e/OS 3.1, focused on the confidentiality of user data, was recently presented by the project founder Gael Duval, also known as gaël duval, the creator of the Mandrake Linux distribution. The platform supports 253 smartphones and offers assembly of firmware for the most popular devices. Smartphones such as OnePlus, Fairphone, Teracube, and Pixel are being prepared with pre-installed firmware/eOS under the brands of Murena, including Murena Fairphone 4/5, Murena Teracube 2e, Murena Pixel 5/7, and Murena Shiftphone 8.
The firmware /e/OS is developed as a branch from the LineageOS platform (based on Android) to exclude the transmission of telemetry to Google servers and enhance the level of privacy. It blocks implicit sending of information, like contacting Google servers for network availability checks, DNS resolving, and time determination.
The supply package offers independent analogues of Google services, eliminating the need for proprietary components. For location determination without GPS, the unifiedNLP layer works through alternative services like Beacondb, openwlanmap, openbmap, OpenCellid, Lacells.db, among others. Instead of the Google search engine, a meta-search service called Murena Find is provided, based on the Qwant search engine. A meta-search service using the SearX engine anonymizes sent queries.
For synchronization of the exact time, servers from the NTP Pool collection are used instead of Google NTP servers, and the DNS servers of the current provider are used instead of Google’s DNS servers. The default web browser includes an ad blocker and scripts to prevent tracking. A service for file and application data synchronization has been developed, compatible with infrastructure based on NextCloud. The server components are open source and available for installation on user-controlled servers, utilizing Bliss Launcher as the default launcher.