Comment by 0x1ch
7 days ago
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.
I don't know if it is generational or regional or what, but there is a solid segment of people that live in very close contact with their bank.
On average, people spend 4 hours and 37 minutes on their phone, per day [1].
I find it hard to believe someone would spend 4 hours and 9 minutes _per day_ looking at their banking app or using NFC payments.
[1] https://explodingtopics.com/blog/smartphone-usage-stats
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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?
I used my bank app yesterday, but since then I've used:
whatsapp, phone, push authenticator, safari (having followed a link from a message), spotify, slack, mail, calandar, disney plus and camera
Do you not do any of that on a mobile device?
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Web browsing (like right now), photos, e-books, lots of messaging, music, sometimes video.
I use NFC payments often, but I wouldn't say that amounts to more than a few percent of my total usage.
Everyone uses their phones differently, of course. I don't think your use is unbelievable or odd, but I do think your use patterns are not the common case.
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.
Even with the sandboxed Play Store, Google Pay disables NFC payments as it requires hardware attestation against Google's root keys.
No inherent reason all that stuff can't work on an open platform. It works just fine on my Linux box with yubikeys, fido2, and smart cards. Gcloud even let's you authenticate with them only to put a medium lived token in plaintext into a sqlite file on disk.
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Curve pay works!
Same, some banks even proactively fix things to work on GrapheneOS when customers ask.
>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.
No idea why you are even bringing this up. It works just fine right now.
It verifiably does not on open source and free android roms like Graphene. Unsure where you're getting your info.
No one even brought that up. We're discussing being able to install unsigned/self signed APKs. Please stay on topic and take your strawman elsewhere.
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[citation needed]
I run GrapheneOS and use several US-based banking apps. I'll not name them since I don't really want my HN account associated with my financials in any way, but I've got a mix of well-known national bank apps and smaller local credit union apps working.
I'll admit there is a single institution's app I've found that doesn't work, but that is just one of several that I use.
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I use GrapheneOS with the Dutch ASN banking app and the ICS credit card app. Pretty much all other major Dutch banks work as well.
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
Google Pay does not work, but some other NFC payment apps do (e.g. Curve).
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.
If you really don't have an alternative in Europe, buy the cheapest Googled Android device (less than $100 or euros), and use that as a glorified 2FA device. It's not ideal because you have to pay for it, but on the other hand Android devices with unlockable bootloaders (mostly Google Pixels now) tend to be cheaper than iThings. A Pixel 9a or 10a running Graphene for everyday use plus a cheap Android phone that stays are home are still considerably cheaper than Apple and Samsung devices, and give the users far more privacy and freedom.
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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.