/e/OS on the Fairphone: Google-free Android with battery life in days
Less software bloat, measurably longer battery life.
- Answers
- Does /e/OS give better battery life than standard Android?
- Topics
- Durable · Freedom · android · apple · cloud · design · review · smartphone
- Full article on willem.com
- https://willem.com/en/2025-03-05_durable-smartphone/
Summary
In 2025 I put the Google-free /e/OS on my Fairphone and battery usage dropped so much that I measure battery life in days. Without all the bloat the phone also runs without any cloud account.
Full text
The Fairphone ships with standard Google Android, fully compatible with the Play Store, but you are free to open the bootloader and install what you want. /e/OS is a popular Google-free alternative: a lean and clean operating system you can tailor to your liking and use without any cloud account. The privacy advantage of leaving American big tech behind is easy to love, but what stunned me was the software efficiency. Without all the crap, my battery usage on /e/OS is measured in days. I completed the setup with apps from F-Droid: the minimalistic unLauncher instead of pages full of colourful icons screaming for attention, Syncopoli to copy photos over rsync, and the Thunderbird app with IMAP idle for push email without Gmail, iCloud or Microsoft 365.