Leaving Apple & Google: Wrapping up the year 2024

Posted on 30 Dec 2024 |

Our dear community,

Before wrapping up this year, which brought us both great achievements and significant challenges, we would like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for supporting the cause: by contributing to the project, donating to /e/OS, spreading the word about our alternative operating system, helping others install /e/OS, choosing Murena products, participating in Murena’s crowdfunding campaigns, and standing by murena.io even in its difficult times. Your kind messages of support have helped our team persevere through these past months.

/e/OS 2.0

Looking back at 2024, we are proud to highlight some significant milestones we achieved, starting with the release of our new version of /e/OS: /e/OS 2.0 with its brand-new Bliss Launcher, a more intuitive user interface in Advanced Privacy, improved mobile apps compatibility and more…Watch our Q&A session from the launch here.

“/e/OS is better than Android, you should try it” Wired

We would also like to thank the media putting the light on our project, to the testers providing the reviews and our community giving talks about us!

This year we had a chance to be featured in such titles as Wired, The Verge, Les numériques, OSNews, TechCrunch, De Keuzevrijheid Podcast, The Linux Experiment, DistroWatch, golem.de and LinuxNews and more…

Murena’s highlights

Murena also successfully launched Murena 2, a device with privacy kill switches. This smartphone, a victim of its own success, is no longer in stock, but the Murena team is certainly preparing some surprises for you next year, with new collaborations and even better products! Murena continued its partnership with Fairphone, offering the most repairable and pro-privacy smartphones. This year, Murena was able to lower the prices of the Murena Fairphone 4 and 5, making them more affordable. The end of the year was also marked by a special Black Friday initiative to collect donations to support ethical gold mining through Fairmined.

/e/OS now supports tablets

Back to /e/OS, we are thrilled that we finally brought our first officially supported tablet! Now available for pre-sale at Murena online store with shipments starting in January at https://murena.com/  and available for installation in the documentation here.

And not without some great newly supported devices as CMF Phone 1 also available at https://murena.com/  and in our documentation here.

New /e/OS Installer

Also, we’ve introduced our new /e/OS Installer bringing the installation process of /e/OS to a new level, by simply using a web-browser! If you haven’t heard about it, read our previous newsletter.

A note on murena.io service recovery

As we wrap up this year, we want to reassure you that significant progress has been made in restoring the affected Murena services. Despite challenges with aging storage infrastructure, we’ve taken major steps forward:

Email Services: Fully restored for all users.
Calendar, Contacts, Webmail, and Passwords: fully operational again
/e/OS Downloads & OTA Updates: Fully functional with improved download speeds.
File Storage (Drive): The recovery process is underway, with data extraction and backup restoration making steady progress.

We’ve implemented additional hardware, sought expert advice, and initiated both new storage stabilization and backup restoration processes to ensure long-term reliability. While full file storage access is still being restored, many users have begun receiving personalized links to retrieve their archived data securely. The latest updates are shared on our forum.We deeply appreciate your patience and support throughout this journey and are committed to keeping you updated on further progress.

Happy New Year from the /e/OS team

As we step into a new year, we want to express our heartfelt gratitude to each of you for being an essential part of our community. Your unwavering support enables us to continue driving ethics and sustainability in the smartphone industry.

At Murena and /e/OS, we believe privacy is a fundamental right, and we remain committed to making it the norm through our products and innovations.

Wishing you all a joyful, prosperous, and privacy-filled New Year!

Warm regards,

Gaël Duval and the Murena & /e/OS Team

Support the project!

User’s data privacy and finding alternatives to regain control over our data has never been a more pressing issue than it is today. The timing is great to build something new!