Gaël Duval (blog, mandrake linux, /e/OS my data is my data, Murena...)

March 27, 2023March 27, 2023

“Why a European mobile operating system can’t challenge Android and iOS”

In a pretty long article published on March 24th at “TheNextWeb”, /e/OS was lucky enough to be highlighted as a proof of “why a a European mobile operating system can’t challenge Android and iOS”.

The full article is mostly FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) and I like it because when you reach that level of argumentation, it means that some people are concerned.

Let’s have a look more specifically at some comments from this industry analyst Jan Stryjak…

January 2, 2023January 2, 2023

Support the development of /e/OS & Murena!

Since 2017, when I announced that I wanted to “Leave Apple & Google”, the /e/OS project has done tremendous progresses: we have succeeded to design and release a modern and realistically usable operating system and cloud services that protect their users from permanent personal data collection and from surveillance capitalism…

April 5, 2022April 5, 2022

/e/OS & Murena websites

Last week, we discovered that our two main websites had been supressed from the Google search engine for more than one year. Although this doesn’t seem to hurt us a lot (we get thousands links from external websites), and although it’s quite fun to extend our “geGooglisation” to being totally out from Google Search, we realize that, besides the misconfiguration of some of our web servers, we have to care about our “SEO” (Search Engine Optimization) at some point.

What is also important is to be transparent about our websites URLs, so that people can put the correct links to them. This is really the most helpful practise that brings new users and let them discover what we do.

So today, what we have is the following websites:

March 22, 2022March 23, 2022

Murena & /e/OS — a product roadmap for 2022: towards our V1?

It’s interesting to have a look back at our past year roadmap: most of the features we announced are either done or close to be completed, which is not too bad! The two things that have shown very little progress are the Smart Assistant project, and the energy efficiency project.

For others items, we have started to introduce better compatibility with Android applications (SafetyNet support), first for the stable devices, and later, progressively, for as many supported smartphones as possible…

October 27, 2021October 27, 2021

Murena smartphones and cloud will protect our privacy

More than ever the market is demanding a new approach for digital products: more and more people around the world want something different, more ethical, more sustainable, with real guarantees about personal data protection.

Four years ago, I wanted to break free from Google and Apple, and therefore we created the “eelo” project, with the simple idea that a different mobile operating system and associated cloud services like email or cloud storage could be possible in this world.

Followed by an amazing community of supporters, contributors and now users, the project progressed quickly, and became a reality by the end of 2018. The same year, we had to suddenly abandon our initial project name for a temporary name: /e/.

Sometimes, temporary things last longer than expected. And despite being hard to pronounce, difficult to search, and largely criticized by many people, /e/ as a brand name had the benefit to be very singular and helped us appear different. In the end it conveyed the idea that we’re doing something special. […]

April 30, 2021April 30, 2021

/e/ & 2021: the year everything is going to change (2/2) — A product roadmap

In the first part of this article, we explained that /e/ has a primary focus on user’s data privacy, circular economy and energy, and that it is fully inline with the global trend seeking to reduce the negative impact of tech in general and helping creating a new paradigm to build a better world.

Do you want to know more about what we are going to do with the /e/OS user interface? Privacy? End-to-end encryption? Smart assistant? Nuke PIN code?

Now let’s cover what we plan to roll out this year…

April 23, 2021April 29, 2021

Google abuse of dominant position: some facts about the Google Android operating system and personal data collection.

This is the first draft of a collection of facts about what happens in the Google Android operating system in term of permanent personal data collection. This has been found while working on /e/OS the mobile OS in which we actually try to address those issues. Please contribute if you know about other facts, or if you think something is wrong: https://github.com/leag1234/some-facts-about-the-Google-Android-operating-system-and-personal-data-collection

April 7, 2021April 8, 2021

“Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on Reddit’s /r/privacy

For those interested in /e/ and other topics, I was recently invited by /r/privacy moderators to a three-days “Ask Me Anthying”

It’s been the second most successfull AMA at /r/privacy!

Retrieve it at: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/mdk6xn/im_ga%C3%ABl_duval_founder_of_the_degoogled_android_os/

March 25, 2021March 25, 2021

/e/ & 2021: the year everything is going to change (1/2) — Introduction

Three years after /e/ – the Google-free ecosystem – came to be, things have never moved as fast as they are now. We’re seeing a lot of traction in terms of new users, of new /e/ accounts, and of /e/-smartphones sales. We’re also getting noticed in many posts and press articles and we’re having more and more incoming requests regarding possible partnerships and business inquiries….