/e/ is the non-profit lineageOS fork by Gaël Duval creator of Mandrake Linux. Was previously known as eelo; and will likely name change again because theyve conceded the whole /e/ thing is silly and hard to search on.
Ive done one or two deep dives on /e/ since theyve provided public buids. I remain curious about them. It looks like Theyve hit a few milestones and it sounds like they courses corrected on a few mistakes I thought they were making. So when I get a new phone in a few weeks; I plan on checking them out.
I thought others might have aspects of the OS they might want me to prod for them while I am looking around.
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Well nevermind.
I tried an unofficial build today on my Nexus 7.
There making all new dangerous mistakes with their app repository. They appear to have made their own service to scrape down APKs from somewhere running off https://api.cleanapk.org. They are just combining it with what their scraping together from fdroid in one big undifferentiated heap of apps and patting themselves on the back for it.
It cannot be legal, and while I don’t begrudge someone scrapping APKs from say Yalp for personal use; its not the kind of sustainable ecosystem their supposed to be building over there in that project.
I will stop checking in on them; they are not what I want them to be. Maybe if they send up a signal flare about having some semblance of sanity after their 1.0. But I am dubious.
They seem down right reckless over there.
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Mod’s suddenly closed all discussion on the ethics and nature of the /e/ app store today. Almost exactly at the time Gaël Duval (or someone using his account) posted a FAQ entry in the official wiki. Describing cleanapk.org as an indepedent software repository their using.
It isn’t indepedent. There is lots of proof of this, but I decided of archiving the most obvious. The actual web API interface claims to be specific to the /e/ app store. https://archive.is/U1E0y
I thought this ought to be documented somewhere. /e/ is taking money from people claiming their going to be building ethical, legal and sustainable infrastructure. Then scrapping APKs from Google or APKPure and mixing it with FDroid and patting themselves on the back for a job well done; and hiding it all behind a proprietary non transparent web service to complete the awfull.
I find it interesting that ive tagged Gaël directly once or twice on this point in the Fediverse but recieved no response. But obviously me and a few others got him and a mod rialed up enough to solicit some response in the project’s discourse.
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