Hands On With /e/, a Version of Android That Ditches Google

Google's Pixel 4 is the most Googly phone possible. If that creeps you out, I have the ultimate alternative: /e/, an easy-to-use, special version of Android designed to keep Google at arm's length.

I've been running /e/, formerly known as Eelo, all weekend on a 4-year-old phone while my colleague Steven Winkelman reviews the latest Pixel. For day-to-day messaging, calls, browsing, light gaming, and photos, my de-Googled /e/ phone can hold its own with the latest flagships—minus access Google services like Gmail or YouTube, of course.

There are other non-Google OSes and Android variants, including Ubuntu Touch and Lineage OS. /E/ is a fork of Lineage, which PCMag's Max Eddy installed on a phone earlier this year; he had trouble re-adding Google Apps, so I decided not to do that here. /E/ tries to strike a middle ground of removing Google, but keeping things as user-friendly as possible with a simplified launcher, non-Google cloud syncing, and support for many third-party apps via MicroG, an open-source alternative to Google's Play Services.

/E/ is the brainchild of a French non-profit foundation led by Gael Duval, the creator of Mandrake Linux and a general-purpose startup entrepreneur. The organization says the OS is still in beta and it doesn't have a hard date for its 1.0 release, but it's clearly getting there.

It's a free product, and support comes with online chat and some message boards. You can check out all the features and download the OS here.

Which Phones Support /e/?

/E/ is available for a range of mostly older phones. This is great—it's not just unGoogled, it's environmentally friendly, giving older devices a new lease on life.

For many people I think the sweet spots will be OnePlus or older Pixel phones; I loaded mine onto a Nexus 6P from 2015. Watch out for frequency band support and VoLTE support, though. Without LTE frequency band 12 and support for VoLTE, you'll have degraded coverage and call quality in the US.

(Google Nexus 6P)

That's easiest to achieve on T-Mobile. Go with a Nexus 6P, Pixel, or Pixel XL, a OnePlus 3 or later, or the Essential Phone (here's a list of T-Mobile VoLTE-compatible phones). It's harder with AT&T; the Pixel 2 XL and OnePlus 7 Pro are your best bets; AT&T bans VoLTE on most other unlocked phones. On Verizon, the Essential Phone, Pixel 2 XL or later, or OnePlus 7 Pro look like they'll work.

US users should be aware that the Samsung devices in /e/'s list are typically not the US models, and trying to load /e/ on a US model Samsung phone won't work.

On my Nexus 6P, I verified that VoLTE was working on T-Mobile, but not on AT&T. /E/ really is based on Android—it's not an entirely new OS, so a lot of the settings screens stay the same.

Installing /e/ Is Not Easy

Unfortunately, installing /e/ is a long walk down a hideous rabbit hole of Android hackery. I can't recommend it to anyone who isn't comfortable Googling arcane threads on xda-developers (the major Android hacking website.)

Duval knows this. /E/'s website promises alternate routes to de-Googling your phone. He's selling preloaded phones in Europe, and promises a mail-in service in the future. But that's where the rubber hits the road with a project like this: start taking orders and you need to hire staff to spend hours reloading phones, hold inventory, and do accounting and payroll. I don't know if /e/ is capable of getting over that wall from volunteer project to real business.

If this screen scares or confuses you in any way, /e/ is not for you, a big challenge the OS will face.

Now, there are thousands of people who hack their Android phones and install new operating systems on them. But the process is far from user friendly. In short, you have to load some software on your PC that installs a "custom recovery image," which can then wipe your phone. Then you upload the new OS onto your phone from your PC.

If this was a "plug it in and run a batch file" process, it would be fine. It isn't. You have to download multiple files from multiple sources, and /e/'s installation guide has key missing steps.

For instance: I got trapped in this weird loop where the recovery image would keep erasing itself. Only after some searching did I find that you can't let the phone reboot after installing the recovery image. Then I got an error about a "vendor image mismatch," which required the downloading of a vendor baseband firmware image from a thread on xda-developers, which was not mentioned in the /e/ instructions. I also had to keep unplugging and replugging the phone to get it to be seen by my PC.

After about three hours of work, I got the OS loaded. Not bad, but scarier than I'd like for consumers.

Using /e/

One you have it loaded, /e/ is a really pleasant experience. The OS comes with its own un-Googled, but cloud-enabled alternatives to all of Google's apps, including your own email address at e.email.

/E/'s cloud is provided by Nextcloud, and you get 5GB of storage for free, with 64GB costing 49.90 Euros/year and 128GB costing 79.90 Euros/year. You get web-based access to your email, contacts, calendar, files, photos and notes; turn off that syncing if the cloud creeps you out. I rely heavily on cloud syncing for Google Photos and Google Calendar, and I was very pleased to see how /e/ mirrors that seamless experience.

The launcher, app store, and Spotify Channels (L-R)

Some of /e/'s apps are better than others. The email app works with any POP/IMAP system, and the browser is a fork of Chromium where /e/ is still working to stamp out callbacks to Google. The OpenCamera app had lots of picture-taking options and is synced to /e/'s cloud. They're all great. The Maps app, offered by General Magic, is trash, with a messed-up POI database that gave me multiple wrong locations for businesses in New York City. The Weather app apparently leaks some data in plaintext.

Of course, you don't have to use the default apps. Using /e/'s app store, I replaced the messaging app with Signal and the Maps app with Here WeGo. They worked flawlessly. (I couldn't find a weather app that didn't in some way access Google; I feel /e/'s struggle here.) I'm disappointed that /e/ doesn't let you delete or hide the default apps you aren't using, though. I'd love to use this system to set up a restricted-usage smartphone for someone who doesn't want a browser, for instance, and that's not an option.

Other apps may not love MicroG. Uber and Lyft rely very heavily on Google's mapping API. Uber crashed, as did HotelTonight, I think for similar location-related reasons. Lyft worked, but the locations of the little cars did not match up with where they should be on the overall map.

Wonky results for mapping and Lyft, nifty /e/ cloud interface (L-R)

Overall, though, for the weekend, I didn't feel like I was losing anything (other than my Gmail). I looked stuff up on the web, sent messages, made calls, got directions on Here WeGo, called a cab with Lyft, found restaurants on Yelp, and dealt with subway reroutes on Citymapper. /E/ fulfilled all my basic daily needs.

I also felt like the OS was keeping me up to date; it had the latest Android security patches, and an easy-to--use, over-the-air updater. I don't know if that updater can handle major version updates, though.

Where Are These Apps Coming From?

All those third-party apps come from /e/'s app store, which only distributes free apps, and is more mysterious than I would like. All /e/ says is that it relies on something called cleanapk.org, which in turn says it mirrors apps from the open-source repository F-Droid.

But cleanapk has a lot of apps that are not in F-Droid, like YouTube, Uber, Lyft, and Netflix. According to a support thread on the /e/ message boards, those apps are probably coming from apkpure, a well-known third-party app store that certainly doesn't make it at all clear where it its apps come from. (Psst - it's probably scraping the Google Play Store.) Uber isn't in APKPure either, though.

"All the content of CleanAPK.org is either submitted by users, or available in various places on the internet and supposed to be freely downloable and redistributable," CleanAPK says. Yikes.

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This leaves me a little queasy about the sources of third-party apps on /e/. Are they being distributed with the permission of the app developers? Are they the most recent, secure versions of the apps? Maybe. If you're fastidious about your app sources, you may want to pick a different store like F-Droid or Amazon's Appstore; they're out there.

Is It Really UnGoogled?

Unless you're an infosec obsessive, /e/ doesn't really get Google out of your life. It just lessens its presence. To see whether /e/ is really Google-free, I loaded a packet-capture app on the phone and also relied on some very salty blog posts from Infosec Handbook, a European site that took a very gimlet eye to Duval's promises of getting Google out of his devices.

According to my own packet captures, /e/'s built-in apps were not talking to Google. Infosec Handbook found some deep-down places where /e/ may be leaking little bits of data to Google, but in /e/'s defense, the group took the criticism to heart and has been working on it in public bug threads anyone can read online.

The real problem is that as soon as you use popular third-party apps, you're back on Google—and even Facebook. Transit app Citymapper, the American Airlines app, the Dark Sky weather app, Twitter, Spotify Stations, and even the Japanese adventure game Seek Hearts all made calls out to either 1e100.net or googleusercontent.com, both Google domains. Yelp calls Facebook.

The operating system isn't hitting Google, but Spotify sure is.

So it's very difficult to have a truly un-Googled phone eithout thinking about it all the time. That said, /e/ does reduce your exposure to Google, especially in terms of making sure Google isn't tracking your location all the time (which Google does with Android phones logged into Google accounts.)

The entire idea of truly unGoogling yourself strikes me as another incidence of our current societal fallacy that we need to solve broader societal problems through individual action. Taking Google Play services off your phone is not really going to prevent your personal data from being used by a giant advertising AI to manipulate your behavior. Only strong data protection laws, backed up with enforcement, would do that.

Should You UnGoogle Yourself?

A lot of people complain about Google, especially online. But few of them care enough to do anything about it. Deleting Facebook is relatively easy; ditching Google means giving up a lot of popular third-party apps that may use Google's advertising or mapping APIs.

The easiest way to unGoogle yourself, of course, is to buy an iPhone and use as many Apple services as possible. About half of Americans are doing that already! So it's not like there isn't a simple, clean, and well-trodden route to getting Google mostly out of your life. As soon as you load Uber or Lyft, though, you've been re-Googled to some extent.

Where something like /e/ really succeeds, for normal phone users, is in enabling (/e/nabling?) a smooth experience on older phones, for a low-cost, premium-feeling experience. You can find Nexus 6P phones online for $100. They're gorgeous, premium, metal-bodied devices that have been abandoned by Google. The Moto Z Play, at $150, also has a great look and feel. /e/ gives them a newly supported lease on life.

That said, the installation process here is sufficiently arcane that it's hard to recommend /e/ to the readers who email me looking for simple solutions to enliven older phones or to get out of tech giants' clutches. Duval and his team are headed in the right direction, but they've hit the border between open-source, tech-enthusiast hobbies and real consumer solutions—it's in the installation, sales, and support process. They also need to be much clearer about where the apps in their app store are coming from, or just offer someone else's store.

I'm really encouraged by /e/, and by its determination to create an easy-to-use (and, hopefully, easy to install) alternative to the full Google experience, including a simple interface and cloud sync. That sets /e/ apart from some of the other Android forks out there, which aren't interested in appealing to less technical users.

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