Founder of Murena and e Foundation Gael Duval has announced several new products for this year, accompanied by updates to the operating system that powers them, /e/OS – all with the aim of advancing what is referred to as, “usable privacy for all.”
Murena is a company behind “de-Googled” smartphones and tablets, and equally free of Google’s services cloud storage suit and app Murena Workplace, while the foundation is a non-profit backed by Murena, which develops the open source, also “de-Googled” Android operating system /e/OS.
More: Breaking Away from Big Tech with Murena’s /e/OS Pixel Tablet
In a blog post, Duval reiterated the importance of open source for people’s “digital sovereignty,” and Murena’s commitment to maintain usability and accessibility, while offering users “exceptional privacy protection from invasive data harvesting practices.”
According to Duval, this direction is resulting in the rapid growth of the Murena and /e/OS userbase around the world, and in the hope of continuing the trend, this year will see the launch of new devices, a swell as Murena Workspace for Businesses and Mobile Device Management, with /e/OS improvements focused on compatibility, stability, and user-friendliness.
Murena Workspace for Businesses comes in response to what Duval says are “continuous requests” to provide an alternative to the likes of Office 365 and Google Docs.
To address this, Murena Workspace for Businesses will include tools for team management, collaboration, calendars, email, etc., with the possibility of hosting on a user’s own custom domain.
Also geared toward businesses and organizations is Mobile Device Management (MDM) for a large number of Murena smartphones and tablets.
Among the upcoming /e/OS updates are enhanced parental control, device recovery, UnifiedPush notifications (a privacy-friendly push notification), advanced privacy reports, and an improved Murena Search engine.
Duval says that the goal is for the current engine to be replaced by an assistant service “that fully guarantees privacy” – but in the meanwhile, Murena is “collaborating with an established privacy-focused search engine to deliver high-quality search results with privacy as a default feature.”
The existing Murena Workspace will receive end-to-end encryption for file storage.
A new Murena tablet is also coming up, with the option to run it as a full-fledged /e/OS device in tablet, or PC mode for better productivity.
And there will be more phone models, including what Duval calls “a new type of smartphone.”
