Interesting article from a generalist magazine. According to it:
- Best Preinstalled Phone: Fairphone 6 With /e/OS
- Best for Pixel Phones: GrapheneOS
- Best for Non-Pixel Phones: /e/OS
- For the DIY Tinkerer: LineageOS
Honestly Graphene is the only one that I’d trust unless you’re not going to add any Google play services at all with Lineage, and I’m including micro G on that too.
Sailfish OS is beautiful and really nice, decent app support, but kind of a pain in the USA, postmarketos shows strong promise, but doesn’t have VOLTE support yet which makes it a dealbreaker for me personally. I know a lot of folks love UBports, it never really was something I enjoyed. I’m really hoping to use Sailfish in the USA someday
Are the upcoming sideloading rules going to impact these forks? If so, we might need to get a Dev fund set up and get EFF involved.
I’ve had my fairphone for a couple of weeks now and am loving it!
For some time now, I am looking with interest at Fairphone and /e/OS/. However, I am somewhat perplexed about the Murena workspace/Cloud. Based on your experience, is it possible to use /e/OS/ without joining Murena? Perhaps associated with a self-hosted cloud workspace?
I don’t have Murena apps. I use their service because I am not aware of other options in my location. Cheap and good. No issues here.
Edit: the customer service resources are limited because they are small. They are responsive, but slow.
Thinking of getting a fairphone 3/4. Currently use a dumb phone and a fire tablet I got second hand very cheap.
I have the 6, and it’s well worth it, I’d assume the 3 or 4 will be quite the upgrade from a dumb phone
All of them unfortunately based on and rely upon Android.
Better than being literally Android.
But the problem is not Android itself. It’s that google has populated it with tracking, profiling and in general anti-privacy software… Remove that, and you have a decent OS…
As long as Google allows that to happen, which is the problem.
Forks are not directly impacted:
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Android_Developer_Verification#Affected_devices
But alternative repos, like f-droid, may have challenges because of some sort of mutual exclusion of developer space, but honestly I didn’t fully get this part
https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
I have a Fairphone 6 with /e/os and it was great until I found out it has no RCS support, and every time someone with real Android or iOS sends a group text you get nothing and they don’t know you didn’t get it. For it to be workable you have to go around begging your friend to turn off RCS on their end and good luck with that.
I had this issue on Fossify messaging. When I used native messaging app the problem stopped. Also, it helps if you name the text group. Like I said though, no issues here except with Fossify, and the same thing happened in my Samsung phone so it wasn’t Eos that was the issue.
