Comment by shiandow
13 hours ago
I don't care about any of these, I just want to be able to have whatever Google pay does without Google.
You could claim that's not an android problem but if you do I don't think you've ever had to explain to people your phone doesn't have a Google Play store.
We had that for many years. But banks stopped supporting their own payment solutions because despite not having to pay commission to Google, it was more expensive to support their own solutions.
That should also tell you that almost any open source / non-profit solution is doomed to fail due to costs. What could work is if, just like the UnifiedAttestation initiative has commercial backing, Wero is expanded to also have its own NFC payment stack. The EU already forced Apple to open up NFC, so it is possible to do it for both iOS and Android.
Would it be possible to build something that works at the os level? And is built in the system itself instead of depending on google services ? I mean I don’t think it requires internet access all the time
Yes, Russian MIR system works this way.
https://glenbrook.com/payments_news/russias-mir-domestic-pay...
Just an application which emulates the card over NFC. No need to Google Play Services. It's been this way for ≈10 years I guess.
Walt https://walt.is/ is building exactly that in Europe. They claim first tap to pay will happen later this year.
Some European banks including mine offer NFC payments via their app as well. You don't need Google services.
> They claim first tap to pay will happen later this year.
Big if true. I guess the main problem is, would the banks from all over the world join in?
Fidesmo (https://fidesmo.com/consumer/fidesmo-pay/) has managed to sidestep this by integrating with Curve (https://www.curve.com/), which issues their own card and then charges your bank’s card from their end when you pay with theirs (tokenized and emulated by Fidesmo).
(Fidesmo also integrates with a whole bunch of banks directly, though mainly EU.)
> offer NFC payments via their app
NAB here in Australia did previously as well, but then they stopped doing that in 2022.
https://www.zdnet.com/finance/banking/nab-waves-goodbye-to-n...
Why would anyone who cares enough about security/privacy to run a de-googled phone want to use a tap to pay app?
People use alternatives for many different reasons (or multiple at the same time):
- They might want privacy from Google. Using Google Pay probably doesn't make much sense.
- Security protection against Google. Google can remotely brick devices with unsandboxed Play Services. After blocking of ICC officials and all the Greenland threats, it's not odd that some European citizens would like to block this Google/US government attack vector.
- They want a clean phone without all kinds of crap like Gemini preinstalled.
- They want to reduce dependence on big tech/Google product in general.
In cases 2-4, using Google Pay with sandboxed Google Play services may be an acceptable compromise for convenience.
Minor note, you forgot battery life. Pinging your location every other minute for traffic and crowd denisty for Google Maps, even using AGPS, isn't cheap.
When you find battery life randomly tanks for a few days, despite not changing anything in your life, it's always Google Play Services that end up being the culprit
1 reply →
Is this an AI response? I get why people want a de-googled phone. What I don't get is why they would want to use tap to pay, one of the payment methods with increased attack vectors.
9 replies →
Without Google doesn't mean the same thing for everyone. I got a Motorola g moto stylus 2025 and have been running an experiment for almost a year now in which I use this device without ever logging into the device with a Google account. Fdroid and obtainium work flawlessly. Aurora Store works for the most part but some apps won't even let me open them without a play store signed in account which is sad.
Because people have different priorities than you do, and just because you can't imagine something, it doesn't mean it's not real or reasonable.
Some people like to have choices other than "all" and "nothing"
How about a way to use contactless payments on, say, a Pebble watch?
Xiaomi Mi Band 6 and 7 support NFC card emulation for payments, issued by Visa/MC.
Tap to pay apps, if the developer is trustworthy or if it’s from your bank, are significantly more secure than even carrying a physical card around as your payment is now locked behind biometrics/a pin.
Also de-googling isn’t the point of GrapheneOS.
Well it's going to be a matter of time anyway, I'm already forced to use an app when I'd rather not.
But more than that I want to have a choice.
Because it’s convenient?
I agree, it's very convenient to have a phone full of corporate malware. But I thought the point of GrapheneOS was to escape that. My corporate malware only runs on my secure card processor which sits in a pocket glued to my phone.
13 replies →
Because tap to pay has nothing to do with Google?
Some people just want a phone without the duopoly and nothing else.
Why can't I use my bank's app, which I presumably already trust, to tap-to-pay? Why should there be a third party involved at all?
You are free to reverse engineer the whole system and find a way to make it work. The world will love you. I suspect there will be a Google hardware attestation at the core of it, but understanding how it works is still huge progress.
That is essentially it as far as my understanding goes.
Google Wallet currently will not run on a fully updated grapheneOS.
Specifically it complains:
"Your device doesn't meet tap to pay security standards. It may be rooted or running uncertified software."
Which is fair. But something that actually works would be nice. I can keep extremely tight control on the NFC stack by toggling NFC with a quick access icon.
Not something I use very often, but not getting locked out of specific, not all, financial rails is one of those things that feels like it rubs up against the perpetual friction that the US founders, framers, whatever; didn't enshrine economic freedom in the same way as speech.
And maybe that's a libertarian fantasy. Idk. Seems worth thinking about for five seconds tho.
Bringing it back to reality. There are an incredible number of issues with trying to set up some kind of a competing service to Google Wallet to the extent that you might as well just go start a bank. And companies like simple have tried that and ended up bought by other banks at the end of it. And they weren't even trying to do anything other than offer people a banking app that wasn't total crap back in the day.
So realistically Google wallet or anything like that is not something I expect to use on a graphene OS phone until the graphene OS Motorola device comes out in the next few years. And that is entirely speculation that services like Google Wallet might be able to work on that device. But honestly it's the only real hope I personally hold for getting access to Modern payment systems on a secure device.
There’s been some progress over at microG, however not fully reverse engineered obviously, and I wouldn’t hold my hopes up for now: https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/361
blows my mind that there’s not a single open solution for mobile wallets and nobody is saying anything.
You have to negotiate directly with Visa to convince them why they should accept your system. How will you convince them?
We desperately need to break Visa's stranglehold on access to the consumer side of commerce. As long as everyone's only innovating and competing on the merchant side of things, we're not really going to get anywhere.
10 replies →
so what you're saying is we should be looking at competitors of Visa
2 replies →
Because a normal card is superior in most practical cases?
I'm starting to come the the same conclusion, but not for practical reasons. My thinking is about privacy. If I buy some chocolates from retailer X (with or without their loyalty system), these parties will know what I purchased and where: The retailer, the bank, the merchant (visa/mc), wallet provider (Google/Apple/Samsung). Any upstream 3rd parties for analytics, big data warehouses, ai companies (fraud detection, spending predictions), marketing companies, research companies, manufacturers. Then there are bluetooth beacons, microphones, cameras, facial recognition, keyboard/screen capture (Gboard, Samsung Keyboard, Whatsapp texts). Then there is sms and popup notification on device that gets ingested by x amount of systems too. So the whole pipe just exists to gather as much as possible data to sell me more stuff. Having a card will take some of them out of the loop or less rich metadata than using a digital wallet.
2 replies →
It is? I haven’t carried my wallet around in years, because Apple Wallet does everything I need. Concert tickets, boarding passes, bank cards, public transport cards, etc. A physical wallet and cards in comparison feels like stone age technology.
8 replies →
No it’s not, all of my and my extended family cards (for… like a decade!) are never even leave the envelope they come in. I’m not sure I personally know people who use physical cards over Google or Apple Pay. I have seen the cards being used in the wild, of course. But I’m having hard time remembering anyone I personally know who does that.
4 replies →
"open solution for mobile wallets"
define open wallet then
My bank had NFC payments for years. None of the remote attestation bullshit. I think it used Google's library for doing QR code scans so it wouldn't work without Google Play, but that's beside the point.
Android already supports this, and has supported this for over a decade. The restriction here is on the side of the finance ecosystem. Everyone has congregated on doing Apple/Google Pay because it's cheap and easy to maintain compared to the alternative. Cards companies and banks make deals with Google, just like they do with companies like Apple, Samsung, and Garmin.
Any fintech startup with serious backing can create an Android app that works on any ROM you can imagine. I don't think you'd have an easy time finding investors for this with how much money you need to partake in the ecosystem, but the API is ready for you to implement.
There's Curve Pay which works on GrapheneOS
What cards & banks does it work with these days? Last time I checked, it wasn't really a serious alternative.
The whole GrapheneOS thing is a bit of a joke. So you either have to buy google hardware or you run google software.
Anyway, looking forward to the widespread introduction of Wero. Maybe there will be some options for third party roms in the name of digital soveranity. Seems like they want to make the EUDI wallet for digital documents no-google capable for that reason at least.
You think Google puts backdoors in their hardware? They've consistently been one of the most open hardware brands since the start, always allowing bootloader unlocking and relocking and providing all required open source code. This is not the same as their software which is invasive spyware.
A phone case with your NFC credit card in a pocket on the back. Boom, problem solved.
This is a great solution if you have the physical card. One very nice use case of Google/Apple Pay is being able to pay with a virtual card in-person.
Google should've been broken up eons ago.
[dead]