Murena boss says customers about to wake up from its cloud storage nightmare How long can a cloud storage outage continue before customers finally give up the ghost? Management at Murena – /e/OS maker – must have wrestled with this at night, though they hope a fix is around the corner. Murena founder and CEO Gaël Duval took the stage at the 2025 State of Open to push ethical mobile OSes and The …
Meh.
When I got my Fairphone4 and installed /e/OS on it, I was looking for a de-googled, cloud-free phone with a micro-SD card for voluminous local storage, that I could back up myself via Syncthing.
Naturally, I didn't subscribe to a Murena account or use any of their cloud services, what would be the point? Someone else's computer etc.
So, I think the mistake was to bother offering these "services" in the first place. I don't want them, I don't know why anyone else would want them, and I don't know why they were offered in the first place.
Maybe, anyone who makes a mobile phone OS that gains any sort of traction soon gets a visit from some men in suits and dark glasses, who tell them that they must offer some cloud storage services.
This gets discussed a lot on their forum. Apparently some work and some don't so if you want to use banking apps then it's pot luck. Personally I'd avoid banking (and most other) apps if the browser can do the job. MicroG is installed so if any app requires Google services than that is how the situation is handled.
Those services were part of the original point of /e/OS - to provide a 'complete eco-system out-of-the-box` for non-techie users, as an alternative to the Google eco-system of GMail, Google Drive, Photos, Calendar & Contacts sync. As someone who knows enough to set up and use your own 'eco-system', you are not really part of the /e/OS target audience
"The Reg is often critical of large tech vendors which inflict outages on their customers, yet at four months and counting, Murena is among the longest running that we've heard of."
I guess you haven't been following Krembil's relentlessly shambolic rebuilding of the World Community Grid infrastructure after IBM sadly, and rather mean-spiritedly, decided that supporting a large and important distributed computing scientific research project was no longer for them, then?
Sadly, WCG has been down and up more often than a yo-yo since then - it took them well over a year before they got things up and running again after taking it on, and it has not exactly had impressive availability since. And this is supposed to be one of Canada's premier research institutions(!). A real shame, as WCG assists and enables genuinely useful research, including into Covid vaccines (perhaps fortunately, IBM were still running it at that point).
Worth also mentioning IodéOS alongside CalyxOS and GrapheneOS as alternative 'de-Googled' phone OSs. Similar de-Googling to /e/OS, but without the cloud eco-system, and without the unnecessary forks of upstream apps: Iodé ships the upstreams and keeps them up-to-date via F-Droid. Iodé seem to have learned from /e/OS / Murena's mistakes :)
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