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Comment by CogitoCogito | Hacker News Reader

I would be totally fine using such a phone for almost everything I do. The only big gap would be using Sweden's identification app BankID and the money transferring app Swish. Unless these were ported to the phone, I would unfortunately lose one of it's most important functionalities for me.

Of course I could just have an Apple/Android phone sitting at home for such purposes, but it is definitely less convenient.

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This is one of the things I worry about - a duopoly not just backed by two wealthy and shady megacorps but also effectively by law as it mandates a mobile app for some things yet the app only exists for iOS and Android & no public API is available.

Shouldn't they at least support the Web?

Several of the “challenger” / “FinTech” banks in the UK (e.g. Monzo, Starling) require the use of their app. They offer limited read-only views via web, but only offer all features via app. No iOS / Android phone? Go to a different bank.

Starling do offer an API anyone can use to interact with their own account. Doesn't allow full functionality yet though.

Even when using the web, some of the banks' websites require a step that involves your phone.

The phone app is effectively used as a hardware security token.

The short stories in Caroline M Yoachim’s Shadow Prison trilogy explore the implications of locking society in to a single mobile platform:

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-shadow-prison...

Great stuff. (No affiliation.) I need to dig into her other work. Apparently quite a bit of her other stuff is also available online for free.

Mobile banking apps will probably be the hardest challenge in the long term. In my cases, for social media and communication, it's easy. I don't use whatsapp and facebook messengers on Android, and for Telegram there is a native client that works well enough (and Tok[1]), for Matrix I wrote NeoChat[2], for mastodon, I'm writing Tokodon[3], there is also some activity around a QML Signal client and implementing other open protocols is doable.

But for banking there is absolutely nothing and bank in the EU requires a mobile phone app to unlock the account. I fear that the only way to solve that is at a political level but this probably also means something unreachable for now. This sucks.

[1]: https://invent.kde.org/network/tok [2]: https://invent.kde.org/network/neochat [3]: https://invent.kde.org/network/tokodon

Same for banking apps here in Italy and the OTP generator of our id system.

Plus some apps I don't strictly have to use but I want to: WhatsApp (to use the web app I should run the android one somewhere it can receive messages with my phone number, cough), Telegram (probably OK), OSMAnd, NewPipe as a YouTube adless replacement (YouTube web is not OK), Google Street View and satellite maps (the web app is vastly worse), car sharing apps (less of that now), random apps from my customers.

All considered I'll have to carry an Android phone anyway so I'm carrying only an Android phone. No Linux phone. But I've been using Ubuntu as my only OS since 2009.

There is a nice plasma mobile replacement for newpipe: https://apps.kde.org/plasmatube/ For telegram the official client works, but you could also use Tok (https://invent.kde.org/network/tok), but yeah for the rest there is no real solution yet :(

> NewPipe as a YouTube adless replacement (YouTube web is not OK)

Actually, Invidious and the likes (viewtube?) are quite good for this. SponsorBlock even works there.

FreeTube makes the phone very hot and is very slow, unfortunately.

Something like NewPipe would be neat though.

> OSMAnd

Something like this is sorely missing. A-GPS isn't integrated in current distros too (a script can load AGPS data in the Phone's modem)

While I'm not entirely sure on the specifics, this is where Anbox can hopefully create a workable Android runtime layer. While it would be a bit overly optimistic to assume that "secure" authentication type apps would work, it could help with adoption for people like me who are missing that one vitally important app required to make the PinePhone a daily driver.

Unfortunately, Anbox isn’t a longterm solution for non-libre Android apps. The problem is that more and more Android apps require passing SafetyNet. It started with banking apps, then spread to games, and Google may one day simply encourage every app to require it. Even Android ROMs stripped of Google services like LineageOS are finding it a challenge to pass SafetyNet, let alone Anbox.

Ah okay, that's unfortunate but thank you for clarifying.

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