Murena’s impact: Shaping a Sustainable Future Together

Imagine a smartphone and online workspace company that puts privacy first, champions sustainability and helps people to access a free and safe web. That is Murena in a nutshell: making the digital world a more free and sustainable place, one phone at a time.

Our products are designed from the ground up to foster a culture of digital rights, sustainability and freedom within the digital sphere. This means that simply by using your Murena phone and software, you make a contribution towards a fairer and more sustainable world. The same applies for businesses, governments and non-profits: integrating Murena products and services into their operations assists them in significantly streamlining their journey towards achieving their sustainability objectives.

Our Pathways to Impact

One device showing the photos application, another one showing the calendar with some events, and the last one showing the maps with some route

Digital Rights: Privacy and Freedom

We develop our products with a ‘privacy-by-design’ approach. This means that we collect zero data about our users, both in /e/OS and the Murena Cloud. We are actually the only mobile OS for which this has been independently researched to be true.* We also help our users to stay private from others, through features such as our Advanced Privacy module that is unique to /e/OS.

In addition, we believe in a free software, a free web, free speech and freedom of choice. We achieve these goals by:

as mentioned above, helping our users to protect their privacy
helping others to protect their privacy as well, e.g. via the Snowflake project that we are currently working to include in /e/OS
lobbying for honest competition and against tech monopolies
building open-source software based on open standards, that helps people easily switch software solutions and have control over their data
helping organizations and countries achieve digital independence and digital sovereignty
having our organization and servers located in the EU, because of the strong protections of privacy and freedom in the European Union

* https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/study-reveals-scale-of-data-sharing-from-android-mobile-phones/

A globe that is composed of a collection of examples of sustainability

Environmental protection and improvement

We are working to become the first mobile OS and cloud that have a positive environmental impact, with a focus on the following areas:

Reducing the energy impact of smartphones: 80% of a smartphone's energy impact comes from its manufacturing and selling. That is why our /e/OS is designed to extend the life of smartphones. By supporting older devices, /e/OS helps reduce the need for frequent replacements, thereby cutting down on manufacturing demands and the associated energy consumption.
Sustainable operations for Murena.io: Our digital workspace, Murena.io, runs fully on cloud servers powered by renewable energy (hydropower). This choice reflects our dedication to reducing carbon emissions and leveraging cleaner, more sustainable energy sources for our operations.
Commitment to privacy: By not collecting or using users' personal data ourselves, and by helping our users protect their data, we prevent resource usage on collecting, storing and analysing data.
Sustainable hardware: We aim for high levels of repairability in the phones that we sell. We especially like working with brands that are environmentally friendly and/or promote fair labor conditions, such as Fairphone, Teracube and Gigaset, and with companies that sell refurbished phones.

Embracing open source for greater inclusiveness

In our quest to create technology that serves everyone, we have embraced open source in all our products. Open source is more than just a development model; it's a commitment to inclusiveness. By publishing our software open source, we're not only fostering transparency and trust but also empowering users and developers worldwide. This approach allows for greater collaboration, adaptability and accessibility and stimulates digital independence and digital sovereignty for people, organizations and governments. Plus, it allows users, businesses and governments with fewer resources to access and use our software. We believe great software should be user-friendly and accessible for all. Murena is a step towards creating a digital world that is truly for everyone.

Evaluation and Reporting: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Here are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on which we monitor our progress towards achieving impact for people and planet:

Privacy and Freedom

Data collected about /e/OS and Murena Cloud users: 0kb
Amount of trackers blocked by Advanced Privacy each month as compared to a Google Android device: up to 200,000 *
https://cybernews.com/tech/android-data-tracking-risk/
Number of smartphone users enabled to stay private on the web by allowing them to block trackers, fake their location and spoof their IP: >40.000

Environment

Percentage of the energy that is needed to run the Murena.io workspace that comes from renewable sources: 100%
Age of oldest device supported: 11 years
Average age of devices supported: 6 years
Percentage of phones sold that have a Repairability Index of 8 or higher: 82%

Open Source

Percentage of code that we develop/maintain/contribute to for our users that is published openly according to recognized open-source licenses: 100%
Number of open-source projects that Murena has created completely new and open-source: three
Number of open-source projects in active use in /e/OS and the Murena Cloud combined and that we host, maintain and/or contribute to: 42

However, we have not yet achieved as much as we would like. We view our impact goals to be a continuous work in progress, with honest and transparent monitoring and evaluation, followed by further improvements. Therefore, starting with the year 2024, we will publish the Murena Impact Report every year on this page.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Our efforts extend beyond our immediate impacts with the fair products that we provide to our users. Murena is proud to contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through our impacts listed above. Through our innovative technology and commitment to ESG principles, we're helping to build a more sustainable, equitable, and inclusive future for all. Join us on this journey! Together, we can make a difference.

SDG Goal	How Murena works towards this SDG
	Goal 1. End poverty Murena’s open-source approach benefits organizations using mobile phones in lower-income countries and innovation in those countries.
	Goal 4. Inclusive and equitable quality education By offering a fully open-source platform for Android, Murena offers learning and growth opportunities for programmers, helping them increase their skills and experience. Open-source helps IT education!
	Goal 7. Sustainable and modern energy Murena’s mobile platform helps to reduce both users’ and companies’ energy footprints in various ways, including: A) all Murena servers run on renewable energy. B) Privacy protections, meaning less data collection and energy use on devices and in the cloud, both by our own cloud (zero data collection) and by other clouds (we help users be privacy-safe while browsing and using apps).
	Goal 8. Economic growth and decent work for all The Android ecosystem contains many markets (e.g. app stores, payments, messaging, backup&sync, etc). These markets are currently highly monopolized by Google. By using open-source software and applying open standards, Murena helps to open up these markets and create more competition. This will be good both for users of Android — increased competition results in ↑ quality and ↓ prices — and for companies, who will be able to compete better with Google, resulting in overall economic growth in the EU. In addition, Murena pays all its employees more than a ‘living wage’ and works with partners, like Fairphone, to improve the labour conditions of people working in production chains.
	Goal 12. Sustainable consumption and production + Goal 13. Combat climate change Murena works in several areas to make the use of mobile phones more sustainable. Part of this is reduced energy usage (see Goal 7 above). In addition, we: - collaborate with sustainable hardware manufacturers (meaning hardware that is repairable, recycled, recyclable and nature-positive) like Fairphone and Teracube - collaborate with refurbished phone sellers - support sustainability standards like the Repairability Index - best effort to provide long software support for mobile devices: 6 years on average for the phones we support, up to 11 years (for now)!

	Goal 16. Peaceful and inclusive societies and justice for all Murena offers an open, transparent and pro-privacy mobile platform: it collects zero data about its users (proven by independent, academic research). In addition, we help users protect their privacy while browsing the web and using applications, via a range of additional privacy measures. This helps people to keep their data safe, plus it helps people to freely access data sources and services in situations where the internet is restricted (e.g. by a dictatorial government). It also helps businesses, non-profits and governments to have autonomy and sovereignty over their data and software.