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Comment by hparadiz

7 days ago

I would caution the decision makers on this. The line between a secure device and a useless toy is perforated and hard to see.

If I can't use banking or my NFC wallets on my phone, it has become 90% useless. The other 10% of usefulness is texting and calls, which every other phone can do.

Unfortunately, this mostly means using the closed android ecosystem.

  • 90% of your usage on your phone is banking apps or NFC payments? That seems hard to believe.

    • That's pretty much my usage pattern too, including some group texting, the occasional call and sometimes taking photos/videos. Otherwise my phone pretty much stays in my pocket or on my table the entire day. What are you using your phone for that makes that so unbelievable?

      3 replies →

  • I run Graphene on my Pixel and banking apps just work. There is no Google Pay, obviously, since Google dependencies have been stripped out from the system. I just carry a credit card.

  • >this mostly means using the closed android ecosystem

    Maybe, but there's no technical reason for this. As I've mentioned before, I can do banking just fine on my Gentoo machine where the entire corpus of software on it, is FOSS and compiled by myself.

  • To you.

    Laptops exist.

    • This is a common answer but it does not apply to at least most of Europe. Because of regulations most banks require to install their app either on iOS or Android to act as a 2FA device. One of my banks gave me a hardware device 20 years ago. When its battery dies I'll have to use their app and my fingerprint.

      7 replies →

    • Have you talked or met anyone born after the 90s? Everyone banks on their phone, it's the norm not the exception.

      Edit: Someone also made a good point, one of my CC's I can barely even manage without the app since the website barely works.

The line between a phone and a computer is what has been perforated. What I need is a modem. I don't need the modem baked into a computer that has a permanently affixed screen and battery. That then pretends to be some kind of secure enclave for my deepest secrets.

"Security."

As if I'm in the government or something. Why can't the people who need military level security get their own platform? Shouldn't they just have that already?