
Leaving Apple and Google: /e/ first beta - indidea
https://hackernoon.com/leaving-apple-google-e-first-beta-is-here-89e39f492c6f
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biktor_gj
Hey, first of all, I love to see the custom rom scene still doing its thing. I
think we need to keep fighting to keep our phones as open and as 'ours' as
possible.

But we, and I mean, a big 'we' as everyone in XDA Developers, Lineage OS
developers etc, have as a group a tremendous knowledge in this area.In fact,
for the most developed phones, we know almost everything about them. If only
everyone could get toghether and do something _better_ than an Android
derivative...

I've been thinking for a while in Libhybris. There's a lot of people working
on tweaking a library that talks to closed vendor blobs, on which every single
one of them is different, to be able to use native libraries directly with
files that were compiled for a framework that isn't available on the target
system.

What if we could use the Android Framework as an API layer, instead of
rewriting everything for every single version of every single library ever
shipped with an Android phone? I am talking on stripping down most of an
Android AOSP image, just up to the point where the System Server kicks in
(just up to a modified Zygote or something like that), and then use the open
Android API specifications to actually talk to the hardware through it. Then
we could make a standard library which would work with _every single Android
phone_

Ubuntu touch, Firefox OS were a failure because they weren't compatible with
the existing ecosystem and because developers wouldn't invest in making apps
for _yet_ another framework. But Sailfish OS has an Android compatibility
layer that lets them run Android apps in their Nemo/Mer/Maemo/Meego hybrid.
Chrome OS can also run Android apps.

If you can get those two poins toghether, you can have a platform where most
of the available phones can run your OS, and you can also take advantage of
the million of applications developed for Android. If you add that to either
Ubuntu Touch, Purism's OS, KDE Mobile or any other OS which is still in
development, you could have the biggest the Community has had for the last 10
years.

Edit: typos everywhere

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mook
I have vague recollecting of FirefoxOS being like that, where the underlying
layer (gonk?) was Android-derived.

They certainly didn't go for an Android-compatible app layer though.

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fabrice_d
Yes, Gonk is composed of the Android kernel, hardware abstraction layer and
some userspace daemons.

With HIDL it should be easier to build a clean abstraction on top of any
Android base starting at Oreo.

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addicted
Why aren’t companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook not setting aside a few
million dollars a year to support efforts like this and the Firefox phone?

Heck, even the carriers would be so much better off if they spent some money
on similar projects. They don’t need to spend too much, and if one of them
takes off, especially if it’s open source, then it helps reduce the tremendous
risks they face since the mobile OS market is currently completely owned by 2
of their competitors.

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vilaca
Microsoft is in the phone business too.

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Sileni
Still? I thought they had spun off their mobile hardware division and were
instead mostly focusing on mobile software. Would make some sense for them to
try to do the same thing they did with PCs and IBM back in the day, since the
OS is already open source (mostly).

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mikhailt
The rumors are they're still doing one last ditch, Surface Phone due to the
growing Surface ecosystem that is making them money and people liking it so
far.

However, they're not going to release that until they finish the CShell that
they're working on the past several years.

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macintux
Is Surface making money or just stemming the bleeding?

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et2o
Microsoft is doing pretty well financially. MSFT stock is up 50% ($75-->$113)
YTD.

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tejohnso
Forked from Lineage but it's unclear what problems are being solved that
aren't already solved by Lineage.

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craftyguy
Worse, it's forked from an old version of LineageOS that will be
deprecated/unsupported once 16.0 is out.

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cmurf
Are they skipping 15 for a bunch of phones? I'm on a 2015 Motorola phone that
still gets weekly 14.1 updates, and I kinda wonder if it's just EOL even for
Lineage.

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craftyguy
> Are they skipping 15 for a bunch of phones?

If your device doesn't already support 15, then it's highly unlikely that it
will ever seen an official release with 15, or 16, or anything >14.1.

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azinman2
“BlissLauncher has original icons“

It looks like a very slight variation of iOS. Not particularly original at
all.

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plufz
My exact thought.

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tobltobs
They even have round corners.

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_emacsomancer_
This looks very interesting. I'm not sure I understanding all of the forking
though - why not just leverage LineageOS, K9 etc. as is just as to leave more
time/energy for the other bits rather than having to separate maintain
(security patches etc.) the forked bits?

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FrankyHollywood
Great initiative, have been looking for an alternative for some time. I had
high hopes for Sailfish ([https://sailfishos.org/](https://sailfishos.org/))
but for a while it only ran on Sony Xperia, current status not clear to me.
Anyone has experience with Sailfish?

Will have a look at /e/ this weekend!

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xsw
I ran it a long time back on a nexus 4, was pretty good. My biggest problem
with it is apps. There's 2 or 3 apps that I really need and these are iOS or
Android only

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flaque
For the love of all that is holy give me back my scroll on your website.
[https://e.foundation/](https://e.foundation/) I thought we got rid of this
scrolljacking nightmare.

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crehn
Why do people do this? It makes for dreadful UX. Reimplementing scrolling is
already a sin; in this case it's even worse. The whole website feels slow, the
scrolling is confusing and inconsistent. Same thing with floating navbars and
other fancy stuff, don't do it if you're unable to make it perfect.

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sharkjacobs
This post is on a Medium blog.

Life is compromise.

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mothsonasloth
I can't wait for Medium to go the way of blogger, into the halls of internet
obscurity.

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sharkjacobs
I'm just worried it will go the way of geocities.

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blt
doubtful, nobody will ever look back wistfully on the aesthetic of early
Medium pages.

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asveikau
I am guessing the comment was more about how geocities closed down one day and
whatever interesting content it contained (alongside uninteresting parts no
doubt) disappeared with it.

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mmjaa
I really wish someone would have the balls to do something really ass-kicking,
like make a PhoneOS that can run all your functions and still give you
something special .. it seems to be within grasp in various and sundry
vertical embedded markets, but nobody has the druthers to take on Apple.

So really, its not just the OS/distribution/custom-tweaked-environment/game-
engine. Its also the hardware.

Like, how can I get the hardware I need to try this out, without going through
hoops?

To me that's a bit more of an issue than a broiled and flailed distro-dejour
re-incarnate...

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pkaye
Do they audit the apps in their app store to make sure they are safe?

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setpatchaddress
I don't understand what this Android fork has to do with Apple.

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atticmanatee
The launcher!

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ikeboy
I just want a high end phone that supports something like lineageos, has a
micro SD slot, and decent battery life. Somehow it's hard to find.

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biktor_gj
Then go with Oneplus. 2 years and 2 months and my oneplus 3 with dual sim or 1
sim/ 1 sd card is still working perfectly fine and receiving updates, getting
Android P before 2019 (in theory)

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axaxs
Oneplus has never offered an sd card slot

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SubNoize
Oneplus X had one. Dual sim and second sim could be used as an SD card.

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rapnie
Love /e/ .. waiting for it. Loved eelo better (I know: the name clashed). I
guess naming your phone e is one more way to become untraceable by Google (or
DDG for that matter). Luckily there is also the 'foundation' part to search
for.

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sixstringbudha
When I see things like these, I always think. Oh look, another thing that will
eventually get bought out.

I mean, I woulnd't want to depend on one of these things unless the people
behind them has shown a enough defiance against the buying power of money.

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chooseaname
We really need more than two main players in the the mobile OS game.

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MK_Dev
"no google no play(store)"

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misterkola
This looks like a great project ;)

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jczhang
The target demo seems to be one that wouldn't care for this product.

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ofcourseianal
“be far more respectful of user’s data privacy”

“the chat application is Telegram”

Is this satire?

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jakecopp
I thought Telegram supported user privacy? Please explain.

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bb88
What if I want to have google services?

While it's awesome you're building a competing infrastructure, it's dead in
the water (at least to me) if it doesn't integrate with what I have already.

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ekianjo
Its not for you then. The project is about getting away from Google.

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amaccuish
Has anyone managed to extract the launcher?

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dcalixto1
if this work will be great! and ppl are not so concerned about privacy but the
google imposition of google apps and services into their phones. that's one of
factors ppl use linux and bsd.

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auct
No

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bocklund
> We decided to adopt “/e/” as a textual representation for the symbol of “my
> data is MY data”

Discussion appears to be here: [https://www.indidea.org/gael/blog/leaving-
apple-and-google-e...](https://www.indidea.org/gael/blog/leaving-apple-and-
google-e-is-the-symbol-for-my-data-is-my-data/)

I appreciate the reason for the name change, but if the goal is to target
laypeople, /e/ is not obviously pronounceable or meaningful for my mom or
kids/teens.

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abstractbeliefs
The other thing is that `/e/`, with the slashes and all, is the exact name of
4chans softcore hentai board.

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rijoja
and without the slashes one of many names of a particularly popular party drug

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sannee
To be fair, people call drugs by myriads of names. Context usually helps to
disambiguate between LSD and MySQL.

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hansjorg
The default MySQL table engine (MyISAM) isn't actually LSD compliant.

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lozenge
MyISAM hasn't been the default since 2009

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graphememes
The name will be the largest barrier to entry.

It is not easy to say, remember, or look for.

This was dead before it even got off the ground, which is unfortunate because
the OS looks nice.

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suyash
Calling it "eOS" could be a viable name for lay people. Officially it can
still be /e/.

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KeitIG
This is kind of already taken by elementary os though.

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sdegutis
How about something phonetic like Slashy Slash (a la Marky Mark)?

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faag36
Judging by the name I thought this was a 4chan board.

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settler4
At least it's not /r/os

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some_account
I understand and welcome more alternatives to Lineage but what's wrong with
their user interface?

If you want to make a better Lineage, I think having built in default app
stores like Apkpure, encrypted system proxies, isolating apps from each other
in better ways... Aren't those more worthy privacy oriented things to work on?

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the_duke
None of those will get you media attention, a successful kickstarter and
funding, though.

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PaulHoule
Boring. I'd like to see a smartphone that ditches the "app" model (where your
phone is an appendage of other people's brands) to a "personal assistant"
(where your phone works for you.)

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calgoo
I would like the OS to have 1 messaging app, 1 email app, 1 calendar app etc.
Then underneath, each provider has their own interface to their backend. Then
we can integrate everything into one system.

Now this idea still needs a lot of work. But, IMO we need to get away from the
app model onto some new paradigm. Present us with our information /data
directly without having to open apps. Think android widgets on steroids.
Windows phone actually had some of this, with letting you create tiles that
where contacts or other info.

