Peace be with you guys πΉ
This is my first Fairphone with /e/OS and I'm really excitedπ. It arrived within 3β4 days even though the estimated time was 2β3 weeks. That suprised me, because I live in Germany.
Everything came intact: headphones, screen protector, and phone case. They also included this little pin to get into the SIM tray slot, which I thought was great. There was no charger in the box but that's intentional on their part. Doesn't matter to me since all modern chargers work anyway.
It's really easy to use and murena has its own browser. The default search engine is Qwant, which I don't use because of Bing. But honestly, my main goal was F-Droid and using apps that reportedly won't work on Google-certified devices starting in September. I've already downloaded my own apps like IronFox and I'm happy π.
Now I'd love to hear your opinion: I think Google has shot itself in the foot with this decision. By closing down Android further, more people will switch to de-Googled systems.
That's my take, what do you think?π€
You could just install Google Maps? Like, still gives Google access to your location and movement, but it's a free device, you can put on it whatever you want.
You could also get a Fairphone with the Stock Rom, that should include Google Services. You could install a different Rom later.
There's also self hosted FOSS location sharing services, but for those, you need a server or VPS, and do some legwork to set them up.
I'm not sure that if I install Google maps on this, will location sharing still work reliably...
As I said - the non-murena version of the Fairphone ships with a ROM featuring the usual integrated Google Services.
Another option I could see - buying a new device doesn't brake your old one. You could keep running your current one till you found a way to set up a degoogled device with all the services you need.
that's a fair point. I'll switch data over to the new phone. but if I need this one I can run a hot spot
You can (although probably the typical buyer of a deGoogled phone wouldn't). There's a lot of open source of more privacy respectful maps/navigation apps available and a Murena Maps is on beta now.
Well, yes, but they specifically require family location sharing. There isn't any privacy respecting service I know that does that, safe for some self-hosted ones (which might not be easy to set up for the average user).
I don't know about Murena Maps (because it's not yet ready for a daily use) but neither CoMaps / Organic Maps / OsmAnd nor the preinstalled Magic Earth seem to require family location sharing. I agree that having a complete selfhosted setup may be requiring too much from the average user. The OSM based solutions are a good compromise to me, aren't they?
They, as in the user, require that feature.