Murena sells a Fairphone 6 Plus that ships without Google services. No Play Services, no Gmail login just to download an app, no Maps baked into the OS. The US price is $699.99, about $50 above the same hardware with stock Android 16. That sounds like a small premium for leaving the largest consumer data machine in tech. A month of daily use reported by TechRadar shows why the sticker is only the first invoice.

What /e/OS removes, and what replaces it

/e/OS is Murena’s Android fork. Because the base is still Android, most apps still install, which was historically the hard part of de Googling a phone. Push and location lean on microG instead of Google Play Services. Apps come through App Lounge from open source repos and from the public Play catalog, and you can browse without signing into a Google account. The Advanced Privacy widget blocks in app trackers, can hide your IP, can spoof location, and keeps a 30 day count of blocked tracking attempts, plus a “Wall of Shame” for the noisiest apps.…