Your 2024 journey with /e/OS and Murena (and a V2!)

GΛËL DUVΛL
4 min readMar 28, 2024

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At the heart of /e/OS’s philosophy is a strong belief that individual choices can drive significant change. The decision to use one product over another is a powerful statement about the kind of world we want to live in.

/e/OS challenges users to reconsider their choices, questioning the systems they support through their use of products and services from companies like Google and the net giants.

By opting for more ethical alternatives, individuals can contribute to a larger movement towards sustainability and ethical technology.

Our roadmap for 2024 focuses on more than developing a Google-free ecosystem. It is about inspiring a collective shift towards more responsible consumption and production, demonstrating that technology can indeed be a force for good.

Adopting /e/OS is one of the best way to cast your vote to avoid a global dystopia and to build a better world, together.

Towards /e/OS v2

/e/OS v1 has been a milestone in our OS development, with the introduction of new features such as new App Lounge and Advanced Privacy.

/e/OS v2 is set to be a milestone in OS maturity. Most innovations will lie into 2 years of improvement for all the specific /e/OS features:

  • Better application compatibility by default. For the most tech-savvy that means: SafetyNet pass, RootBeer pass, licensing server support, …
  • Enhanced Advanced Privacy features, with a more intuitive user interface.
  • Improved Camera application.
  • Unified Single Sign-On (SSO): once logged into /e/OS with your account, you will be able to reach all services at murena.io in /e/OS’ browser without needing to re-authenticate.
New Advanced Privacy widget

But some changes will also be very visible:

  • New launcher! BlissLauncher 3 should be far more reliable than BlissLauncher 1 (and yes, as I can hear you asking: BlissLauncher 2… just failed). It will also progressively add popular features such as landscape mode and widget on all views.
  • And with a new launcher what’s better than updated icons and wallpapers?
Icons evolution

Something that users of murena.io digital workspace also noticed is that we have a brand-new Gallery that is able to display a Timeline of all pictures and also a maps of all the places where pictures have been taken.

And this year we will add new features to murena.io, including an online forms feature.

More improvements under the hood!

We have started to work on several topics, so what you can most probably expect by the end of the year:

  • An additionnal push notification system: we want to offer a new default option to developers who want to avoid going through the (Google)Firebase Cloud Messaging. How we will integrate into /e/OS is still uncertain but the technology works and is mature enough.
Push Notification PoC on /e/OS
  • Something that arrives late will be a “Speech To Text” feature that will be useful in many cases, such as answering quickly a message without typing or interacting with an assistant.
  • This leads to an /e/OS assistant: although we’re still exploring various options for it, we’ve proven that even a Large Language Model can run locally on a smartphone. Adding privacy-safe assisting features is among our priorities.
  • Parental control will be available to protect children accessing adult contents when they are using a smartphone with /e/OS.
  • Backup! a long awaited feature that will ease our life as /e/OS users, so we can easily reinstall a new devices from a previous installation. Today it’s only possible for media contents, calendar, contacts and other files, but not application re-installation and application settings & data.

We’re also considering various options to introduce a new Murena device this year.

And also… B2B!

We have resisted to pursue B2B opportunities until now: we had to focus on our primary project, which was mostly targetted to individual users. But we see more and more organization purchasing Murena smartphones with /e/OS, and they have been asking for pro features on both the smartphone and our digital workspace at murena.io

Murena.io workspace

So expect to see some pro-oriented features, including a corporate workspace, available in our offering in 2024. Professionnals also deserve alternatives to protect their data!

Ready to join our journey to make a positive impact in the mobile world?

Subscribe to our newsletters for the latest latest Murena & /e/OS’ developments and releases (two emails per month in average).

— Gaël & the Murena team.

Follow me on @gael_duval on Twitter, @gael@mastodon.social on Mastodon.

More about Murena products & services: https://murena.com

More about /e/OS: https://e.foundation

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GΛËL DUVΛL

Software engineer, Entrepreneur: Mandrake-Linux 1998, Ulteo 2006, /e/OS & Murena 2017, Open Source advocate. https://gaelduval.com/about-gael-duval/