Company: Murena
Founder: Gaël Duval
Website: https://murena.com/
About Murena
Gaël Duval founded Murena in 2018. He had already founded and developed the privacy-focused /e/OS operating system the previous year, which is available free of charge on Android devices via the non-profit eFoundation, but implementing /e/OS requires technical expertise and he recognised that there were people stuck on Google’s Android who wanted a privacy-focused alternative out of the box. And so he started Murena – one side of the business sells new and refurbished Android devices with /e/OS preloaded, the other offers a SaaS alternative to Google Drive and Office365 called Murena Workspace.
Murena Workspace offers the storage and tools you would get with Office365 or Google Drive without surveillance or compromising data privacy. There is a full cloud-based ecosystem – including a dedicated email account, calendar, cloud storage and contacts management alongside other useful tools like Word documents, spreadsheets, to-do lists and more – without any user tracking.
It’s an ethical alternative to big tech’s solutions; powered by open-source providers NextCloud and Only Office it ensures transparency and is against vendor lock-in and monopolisation for a fairer, more competitive industry that prioritises the end user rather than profits.
The key is Murena and /e/OS is dedicated to ethics and data privacy across the board – not just keeping users’ photos private, there is zero tracking in any of its code and its open-source nature means anyone can audit and confirm such claims are correct. This is a standard they want to set, and a positive impact they intend to have on the industry. With proprietary software, there is no transparency.
A key challenge Murena Workspace has faced, and continues to face, is convincing people to switch away from big tech. People are slowly starting to comprehend that big tech’s monopolisation isn’t good for people or the planet, but are often reluctant to try new solutions.
However, one of the main reasons users like Murena Workspace is the high level of synchronisation between it and the /e/OS mobile operating system; Murena is unique in this compared to other workspace/cloud providers as it integrates optimally with users’ mobile phones.
Also, the open source community is a collaborative one, and Murena and /e/OS often partners with other ethical tech providers including hardware manufacturers Fairphone and Teracube, to bolster each other’s presence and share resources.
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