back to article 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 …

  1. Pete 2 Silver badge

    WAG

    >the outfit had approximately 120,000 open accounts, with 50,000 active in the last 30 days. All accounts have been affected by the storage outage.

    > He acknowledged users' frustration and said, "You always have some angry people,

    As a wild-assed guess, about 70,000 of them!

    1. cyberdemon Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: WAG

      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.

      1. Roj Blake Silver badge

        Re: WAG

        I also have one of their phones and no desire to use their cloud storage.

        The phone has been a joy to use over the last few months without the constant status messages telling me I needed to upgrade my storage.

        1. gzgweilo

          Re: WAG

          For those of you who use it can I ask do banking/financial apps work without any Google apps or do you still have to use workarounds like MicroG?

          I could never get a definitive answer out of Murena when I asked them a few years ago.

          1. Captain Hogwash Silver badge

            Re: WAG

            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.

            1. cyberdemon Silver badge

              Re: WAG

              I use the NatWest App on /e/OS. I don't use my phone as a contactless card though, but all the other features work

          2. Roj Blake Silver badge

            Re: WAG

            Revolut works fine, but I don't use contactless.

      2. petefoth

        Re: WAG

        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

      3. logicalextreme

        Re: WAG

        £200 to store 2TB for a year and people wonder why I don't like cloud. You could buy yourself two 2TB hard drives and pay for a training course to teach you how they work and how to back up to them within a week for less than that.

  2. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Stop

    "even if the business is an open source company with well-intended aims"

    It's a business.

    If it's getting paid, it needs to provide the service it promises.

  3. thod

    This is a sad situation and they have not communicated well with it.

    Still my wife has the fairphone 4 with murena and it works great, we did not choose the murena cloud option since we have a nextcloud at home but I understand it could make things easier for users.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    the longest running outage

    "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).

  5. petefoth

    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 :)

  6. PeterM42
    FAIL

    "Microsoft's AI less useful than expected"

    No surprises, there. I tried using Microsoft Maps once; whole large buildings such as schools were apparently located about ½mile away from their actual location.

    PATHETIC!

  7. VeryRealHuman
    Unhappy

    I dunno

    I want to like them, but I have a bad feeling about Murena. /e/os feels like a fake phone UI from a Netflix series. Also this is an insane amount of time to go down for

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "We have seen a lot of people who wanted to donate some money to help solve the situation"

    Yeah right, "if I pay extra, can I have access to my data sooner?" is probably more like it

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like