Comment by grapheneos
5 hours ago
There are alternatives to Google Pay in Europe which work on GrapheneOS and it's likely most of those work on a production (user) build of LineageOS with a locked bootloader too. Only a few are specifically permitting GrapheneOS, and those would also be willing to explicitly permit a subset of LineageOS devices too. They'd need to start keeping a bit more of the standard security model and features intact which wouldn't be a large change. They'd mostly just need to make full production builds and start officially supporting locking. Having the privacy and security improvements done by GrapheneOS is in no way a requirement for compatibility with those financial apps.
This really is really a great development. I really just hope that will be true for the new European Digital Identity Wallet as well and we see adoption across multiple industries.
The state for me personally is that my joint bank account with my wife uses a play integrity protected banking app (changing your own a accounts to a better bank is one thing). Also beyond banks things now require proprietary 'secure' TAN apps like my insurance broker. The issue is that for me every a new problem like this popped up and to find solutions take time over and over. Even thing that work now may stop working the next minute because there is no real effort of fintech and its management to keep compatible with niche devices. It is mostly either coincidence or the effort of tech savvy individuals at those companies.
We only can hope that a large group of people including regulators get sanctioned or mandated not to use any US tech even privately so they see little offer is left even inside Europe that is truly sovereign. I gave up for now (after about 10 years exclusive on LineageOS ). I actually bought a pixel to have Graphene as a way out of vendor ROMs again, but I still don't have the energy to switch (alone reregistration all those TAN apps takes ages often involving waiting weeks for stupi snail mail activation letters)