An iPhone or an Android smartphone collects several megabytes of your personal data every day to Google Servers, even when it is inactive.
Murena smartphones have been designed to offer a different approach to users who care about privacy and data-hungry handsets.
Those smartphones are running the open-source “/e/OS” operating system, which is fully “deGoogled”: by default it doesn’t send any data to Google and it’s been designed to offer a great and natural user experience.
/e/OS is paired with carefully selected applications. They form a privacy-enabled internal system for your Murena smartphone. And it’s not just claims: open-source means auditable privacy.
It's by far the worst part of the project. Any time you have a problem - however minimal - you have to search specifically in the community forum because there's just no way in hell including /e/OS in the search terms is going to help you find anything useful at all.
I installed it on my Fairephone4.
Have to say i'm pretty impressed, everything works fine including maps and bank application. They really managed microG well.
The only probleme I got in the last 6 month is that I can't installe paying app on my phone. I created a google account to connect to the app store but the page to pay just never load.
That's not a big deal for me anyway.
Similar experiences on the Fairphone 3. MicroG is fantastic - everything you unfortunately need from Google services, but in a way that maintains your privacy.
At least on the Fairphone 3, downloading an apk for the Google camera app turned out to be a lifesaver though - the open source camera applications were unfortunately not capable of producing as good pictures, which is very important to me. :)
To be fair most people saying "[android/OEM skin] looks like iOS" also don't know how iOS looks, they just think that having squircles and blur is being an iOS clone
You can install your own launcher - I prefer the KISS launcher, which is great at getting out of your way and just do exactly what you want it to do as efficiently as possible.
I personally use it with Neo Launcher, which is FOSS, set it up to show round icons for this very reason you're pointing out. Once done, the experience is great!