Photo: Scott Gilbertson
While I love the privacy features of /e/OS and have even gotten into the habit of spoofing my geodata most of the time, the real feature that kills me is the /e/OS app store, called App Lounge. When I used LineageOS, I installed apps from several different app stores. There’s F-Droid, which hosts open source apps, and Uptodown, which supports a few apps I use (Vivaldi being the main one), and then I had a few I could only get through the Google Play Store. As anyone using LineageOS can tell you, it’s a lot to keep track of.
/e/OS App Lounge combines apps from a variety of sources, including the Play Store and F-Droid, among others, making them all available in one place. (You can also choose to show only open source apps.)
Being able to stay anonymous when logging into any of the app stores is also handy, although you’ll need to be logged in to get the apps you’ve paid for, as they’re tied to your user ID. Anonymous login also failed several times, giving me token errors. This is one of the few places I’ve had trouble with /e/OS.
App Lounge uses a familiar design reminiscent of Google Play, but adds some features. The first is that App Lounge provides information about the privacy of each app, rating them on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is terrible for privacy and 10 generally means no tracking programs. App Lounge also categorizes apps based on the permissions they need. The fewer permissions (like access to your photos or geodata), the higher the rating. This is a good way of providing complex information in a way that anyone can easily analyze.
In a win for the wider Android-alt community, /e/OS claims to be working to make App Lounge available as an app that can be installed anywhere. (Meanwhile, the Aurora Store is a close alternative.)
Which doesn’t work
As much as I like /e/OS, it’s not perfect. I had minor problems with the geodata. I live on the road, so my location changes every two weeks. Sometimes /e/OS takes a while to figure this out, and the Maps app will show me search results based on where I’ve been in the past week. The included Maps app itself is still rough (and uses proprietary code). It’s better and more accurate than any other map app I’ve tried, but it’s not as good as Google Maps. I don’t care what you think about Google; its Maps app is second to none. I always use it as a backup when the default /e/OS application can’t find what I need.
Another big feature I miss is text-to-speech. Currently, /e/OS ships without text-to-speech. There is a good summary of the available options on the /e/OS forums. Neither is ideal, but I managed to get by with a combination of Sayboard and a standard /e/OS keyboard. The good news is that built-in text-to-speech is on the roadmap for /e/OS in 2024. This will also open the door to the /e/OS Assistant, which is currently unavailable. The project is unsure what form this might take, given the privacy implications of interacting with the server to answer queries, but one possibility is a large locally executed language model.