Comment by justonenote
5 days ago
> None. Explicitly banned. ... I can't blame them. If some idiot roots their phone and downloads malware, the bank may be responsible for refunding them. I can see why they don't want that headache.
I mean this is the whole reason GrapheneOS does not ship a rooted version that they attest to. I doubt they are explicitly banning GrapheneOS, what they are doing is only trusting Google attestation.
The reason some banks explicitly allow GrapheneOS is because its easy for them to also trust GrapheneOS attestation, because it is not a rooted OS, and sensible security teams in banks can see that its more secure than any other Android phone including Pixels.
I wish people would understand this better, its what gives GrapheneOS a fighting chance of becoming a legitimate open source mobile OS that is accepted as secure for consumer use and that is not controlled by Apple or Google.
Providing root access to a huge portion of the OS with a way for apps to obtain it goes against the privacy and security focus. It's never a reasonable way to implement the features provided by those kinds of apps. It's an insecure shortcut being taken to implement features poorly and insecurely without proper integration. Providing root access to end users is a much different thing than giving it to a huge portion of the OS with a way for apps to request it.
We wouldn't mind providing a 2nd set of releases with user root access but those would have separate signing keys for privacy and security reasons. It would not be accessible to large portions of the OS to apps. We don't do it because it would double the number of builds and would be a massive amount of additional work for managing and testing it. It would take immense resources to create a variant of the OS which we'd recommend against almost anyone using mainly to provide a novelty. We have much better uses for our resources. Resources are always limited and doubling the number of OS releases for a 2nd time would have a huge cost.
That's not the whole reason, or even the main reason GrapheneOS doesn't support or encourage root access.
The central design theme of GrapheneOS is to have stronger sandboxes and more limits on what apps can access than stock Android does. Granting an app root access does exactly the opposite; someone behaving rationally and consistently usually won't want to do both on the same device.