I purchased a Samsung Galaxy S9 (in the US) from them. My first impression: Everything works. Apps (if it's not on their store, which is a mix of F-Droid and other APKs, it's on Aurora), Google services works without signing (MicroG), GPS works, OTA updates work (with one click).
My biggest complaint is that their App store isn't just F-Droid, and their APKs are often out of date by 1-2 weeks. My biggest compliment (besides everything just working to the point I could recommend it to a relative), is that they are active and engaged in their community, regularly reading their forum, soliciting feedback, and posting weekly updates.
Yes, I've been using /e/ in daily use for over a year now.
It's pretty good most of the time. It will not satisfy people who want/need a truly "hardened" device, but if you are just a normal person who wants to feed less data to the ad-tech monsters, then it works well.
The default /e/ app store has both FLOSS apps from F-Droid and free-as-in-beer proprietary apps mirrored from Google Play store. Whether an individual app works well or not depends on how tightly coupled it is to Google Play Services
It's rather good and at some point they managed to have release for my previous phone model when the lineageos stopped!
I used it without their cloud services. Some of the pre-installed apps cannot be removed (like email, pdf readers) which is slightly annoying. They have their own launcher/desktop but it's not that good, it even crashes time to time.
Last time I checked, it was not super transparent which non-FOSS store they used.
Overall I think the experience with LineageOS is better but /e/ comes with MicroG so it's practical if you need a few proprietary apps.
> Last time I checked, it was not super transparent which non-FOSS store they used
I'm pretty sure that's deliberately opaque because mirroring APKs from Play store breaks some ToS somewhere and they don't want everyone getting their Google accounts banned.
