Murena, the French privateness agency that’s forked Android to ship so-called deGoogled smartphones, has repeated the trick with a pill. So for those who’re eager to get your fingers on a shiny Pixel Pill — however with out the standard bundle of Google apps and providers — Murena has you lined.
The Murena Pixel Pill runs the /e/OS open supply working system, fairly than Google’s taste of Android — therefore the promise of a “privacy-focused Android expertise” on the machine’s 10.95-inch LCD show.
“Take pleasure in all of the efficiency and flexibility you want, whereas minimising knowledge monitoring, having a safer expertise, and with no Google providers gathering your private data,” Murena additionally writes. It says it added the pill to the {hardware} choice it resells with /e/OS put in in response to “important demand.”
The Pixel Pill, which comes with 128 GB inner storage and eight GB RAM, is available for purchase from Murena’s on-line store for €539 (or $549 within the U.S.).
Being deGoogled, you received’t discover the Google Play Retailer itself on the machine. As an alternative, /e/OS presents an app market referred to as App Lounge the place customers are in a position to obtain apps which can be accessible in Google Play and F-Droid “anonymously” — though accessing paid apps does require signing in with a Google account. (For extra on the trade-offs entailed in Murena’s app retailer workaround, learn our earlier assessment of e/OS.)
Whereas recreating a full app market expertise with none hyperlinks to Google in any respect is clearly a tough drawback, Murena has been busying itself in constructing privacy-focused options for standalone apps like Google Drive and Workplace 365. So Pixel Pill customers can faucet right into a freemium file storage, backup, and workplace suite providing referred to as Workspace that gives as much as 1 GB of storage without spending a dime, and paid plans thereafter.
