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. […]

Nevertheless, as we are reaching more and more people and progressively catching interested from a mainstream audience, we have to introduce a new, strong brand, easier to use, easier to refer to and easier to share with people. The goal of this brand is to have a strong name to call our products, intended to be used by a large number of users in many different countries and cultures.

It took some time, since we had many different candidates, both from internal suggestions and from our community. We wanted something that would both convey our project’s values, and that could be within the same lineage of our initial project name. We also had to secure this new brand making sure it was not already in use in the same field of activity, and by entering a long trademark registration processes.

MURENA

And here we are: today we introduce the “MURENA” brand.

Murena aims to free people specifically from the Big Tech and their control over our personal data. More generally Murena designs digital products and services with a more virtuous approach on personal user data, and with a positive impact.

Murena smartphones and Murena cloud

Murena will first be used for smartphones and premium online services on the cloud.

Does “Murena” replaces “/e/”?

Not entirely: the mobile operating system that runs Murena smartphones will still be called /e/OS, at least for now. So we have Murena smartphones “fueled by /e/OS”, or more simply “that run /e/OS”…

So people in the community will be able to continue to talk about the development of /e/OS, while the general public will probably mostly hear about Murena smartphones and premium cloud services.

What’s next?

Starting from today, smartphones are called “Murena smartphones” on our online shop.

Dedicated websites with the new brand will also appear progressively.

Stay tuned!

— Gaël & the team (follow me on Twitter / on Mastodon)