Comment by sterlind
3 months ago
use a fork. GrapheneOS is amazing. I feel like I own my phone, I trust my phone, and it obeys me, for the first time in a decade.
unlock. flash. spread the word. use the fork, Luke.
3 months ago
use a fork. GrapheneOS is amazing. I feel like I own my phone, I trust my phone, and it obeys me, for the first time in a decade.
unlock. flash. spread the word. use the fork, Luke.
Sadly that's not always (or won't be soon) an option. I recently had to buy a new phone so that I could run the 'updated' banking app that requires attestation to run — I was running google free Lineage.
Without attestation, banking apps stop working and without a banking app, you are locked out of modern life in many ways.
This latest Google move makes it impossible to run an attested Android without the sideloading limitation. That means that you'll have to choose between GrapheneOS and using your banking app.
I'm sad to say that I've already had to make that choice :-(. I feel that I was coerced into it.
Why didn't you just change banks?
I'm in the same boat as OP. Used GrapheneOS until Google Pay was enabled in my country. ALL banks then killed their proprietary NFC wallet apps in a month and told users to use Google Pay. I switched to using a Garmin watch for a while.
Then bank apps themselves started giving me warnings that my device was insecure (the irony) and I got increasingly frequent KYC questionnaires coming my way. One of the banks also disabled access to some money transfer services, which I suspect is because of some flag on my account in their system.
I had to ditch GrapheneOS at that point. There are simply no banks that I can switch to.
2 replies →
Ah, yes, just use this small project fully dependent on Google and that requires you to buy exclusively Google phones. This is the way.
This is also no long term solution. GrapheneOS can't diverge from Google android to much, otherwise modern apps stop working. And Google will definitely go for alternative roms next.
I could've sworn GrapheneOS or LineageOS people were in talks with manufacturers to deliver devices that run one of those OSes out of the box. I wonder if there were any updates on that front
That would be a great step in the right direction. More people using it means more options down the line.
Its soon time for me to get a new phone, but buying a Google pixel to flash GrapheneOS seems like paying the bully.
If they do it, I will switch ASAP.
I use GrapheneOS, but it doesn't solve this class of problem. If your {banking|taxi|cash} app doesn't pass Play Integrity API running under GrapheneOS, you are out of luck for those apps. There are different levels of Play Integrity pass, and GrapheneOS does not pass the highest level of them, so some apps may work, and others not. I don't want to use Google Pay, but I couldn't if I wanted to on GrapheneOS, and I've seen people in this thread saying that where they live it can be difficult to pay for something any other way.