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Comment by Jaruzel | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to do this to my phone (Moto G4). However I absolutely need my banking app, and I know it just wont work without Google Play running. Likewise as the article says, Google Maps is a must even with location tracking off. I do switch off as much personal data leakage as I can, but I'm not naive enough to think that Google isn't still collecting data on me.

Unfortunately, I just don't think a free open source phone will full modern functionality is ever going to exist.

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FOSS android user here (I'm on the HN Materialistic app now actually)!

I had the same issue with my bank, but I resolved it using the F-Droid app "Yalp Store", which wraps the playstore. Now I have my banking app on my phone!

It's not FOSS, but even on my Linux PC I have binary blobs for drivers and stuff. It's good enough for me, it might work for your app too

The problem is not obtaining the APK, that's the easy part. The hard part with a lot of online banking apps (as well as apps like Netflix) is that they use (and require) Google SafetyNet to ensure that your ROM is "safe" (i.e. hasn't been tampered with). The guys over at the MicroG project are trying to find ways around that but it's really a cat-and-mouse game. Last time I tried (which, admittedly, was quite a while ago), neither my online banking app nor Netflix worked for me on a custom ROM.

Hmm. I have MicroG since months and last i checked Netflix worked just fine.

That's good news! I assume you're using Magisk for root?

Actually no. I'm using Lineage su addon.

Nah, I found my banking app (Barclays UK), just crashed with MicroG.

Cheers, I'll look into that!

Give Aurora Store a try as well, also in F-Droid. Nice UI on top of Yalp Store :)

I have a Fairphone 2 running their non-Google, largely FLOSS, version of Android with F-Droid app store. Sometimes, I'm slightly annoyed that I can't install app X but from the top of my head I can't even tell you what values X took. So it can't be that bad. The only regular annoyance is having to use Open Street Map. Very nice maps, but rendering and localization (GPS-only) are too slow.

Which OSM app are you using? I've started using "Maps" (the OSS variant of https://maps.me/, available on F-Droid) and it has pretty much replaced Google Maps for me. Performance is good enough for me, and offline maps are a killer feature.

Also, try https://osmand.net - great and getting better all the time !

Thanks. I just installed it and, yes, it feels much smoother than OsmAnd which is what I've been using so far. Unfortunately GPS doesn't seem to work.

There's also MicroG wrapped in LineageOS so you can avoid G altogether

https://lineage.microg.org/

Unfortunately, MicroG hasn't been maintained in the past months or so and the only developer barely communicates anymore. It's getting to a state in which it will stop working very soon.

Maybe some community will step up and adopt that project. Anything that relies on a single dev is probably unsustainable.

Regarding OS there is still hope. Check out e.foundation (formerly eelo).

And puri.sm Librem 5 if you want a linux-based OS (have to wait for android app support for a while still, I think).

There is the Anbox[0] which looks promising.

[0]https://github.com/anbox/anbox

One tangential issue I have, is that all NFC-payment apps seem to use Google Pay or some sort of API detecting custom roms or root, disabling NFC-payment features.

Honestly this is probably a good idea.

When you think about how many people use Johnny No Good Hacker’s lastest ROM because it’s largely the OEM supported Android x with one or two Android ++x supported features, it really sounds like a good idea.

It would be nice if there were a safe way to bypass that “immobilizer,” though for people that trust their ROM origin and the software on their phone.

I wish we could just emulate non-floss Android Qubes style. Then the banking app could just be spawned when needed. Maybe not full emulation but containers might be good enough.

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