The DeGoogled smartphone Murena One, which protects your privacy
(Picture: Murena One Android)It’s well established that buying a smartphone typically involves sacrificing a certain amount of privacy as manufacturers and app makers generally like to track owner behaviour. Conventional wisdom suggests that’s just part of the pay-off for the convenience that modern devices offer.
But Murena, a start-up founded by Mandrake Linux creator Gaël Duval, intends to offer buyers the best of both worlds: a smartphone that behaves like your average Android device, while giving users control over their privacy and data sharing.
The Murena One, the company’s latest device, launches in the UK today — although, oddly, the price still only displays in Euros, coming in at €290.83, or around £261.
As the price suggests, it has fairly modest specs (Mediatek Helio P60, 4GB RAM, 128GB storage), but the real appeal is its /e/OS operating system. It’s built on Android, but with the data tracking and sharing elements stripped out. It has a privacy widget to warn users of app-data collection, and uses an open-source cloud server for backups to cut out tracking.
But this focus on privacy means Google apps aren’t present by default, and that includes the Google Play Store, which would normally kill off any serious aspirations. After all, without apps, smartphones are distinctly limited.
Murena’s solution is the App Lounge, which draws in apps from various sources, including the Google Play Store, and can be browsed anonymously. Paid apps are even an option, though it sounds a bit fiddly: “In order to purchase a paid app, users will need to use a Google account linked to another device that has Google Play installed,” the company explains.
But some are sceptical as to whether the App Lounge violates Google’s own terms of service, given it uses the Play Store API to access its apps. If that’s the case, then it may just stop working one day, and anybody who signs in with their Google account could theoretically see themselves banned for good measure.
The Evening Standard put these concerns to Murena, and the company indicated that it didn’t believe this would be an issue. “Regarding the Google Play Store Terms of Services specifically, it seems they are not totally in line with the GDPR privacy, and they can be viewed as a distortion of concurrence on the market,” Duval wrote in response.
“App Lounge restores this situation and the rights of users by allowing the user to access Play Store contents in a more fair way. In particular, it provides a choice to users: they can either use an individual Google account, or choose to stay anonymous and use an anonymous account. This gives users the opportunity to escape the massive personal-data collection performed by Google and to still access Android applications that run on /e/OS - including the applications they used and paid for before.”
For those keen to escape Google’s tracking, there’s one other option: the iPhone. Apple has made a big deal of privacy being a fundamental concern for its devices, including the iPhone, which since last year has come with the option to prevent apps from tracking users and can create burner-email addresses to avoid your actual contact details being shared.
Given Apple makes its money from hardware, rather than advertising, it can certainly make this ideal a key marketing point, but some privacy concerns still remain. Privacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are pushing Apple towards adopting end-to-end encryption for iCloud backups, for example. And while Apple currently secures messages sent via iMessage between iPhones, it doesn’t offer the same protections to those sent to Android devices — something the campaign organisation Fight for the Future is keen for the company to address.
