Hacker News Reader

Comment by electric_mayhem | Hacker News Reader

Is it safe to assume that GrapheneOS will not be affected by this?

GrapheneOS or other similar OS won’t be the issue.

The issue will be your bank, your gov, your uni, and school not releasing a compatible app for you.

And nowadays a device that cannot communicate or be trusted by other actors of the network (internet) is pretty much useless.

I hope those entities will wake up and start serving equivalents functionalities via the open web.

That is why we have the good old WWW for.

I already have to tell everyone I don't have a smartphone because stuff doesn't work so we'll on graphene and I don't want to explain.

I typically tell them I don't have an Apple or Google play store. That typically confuses them enough that I can avoid explaining more than just telling them that that is indeed possible.

Nearly everything works on GrapheneOS.

Although many people do say that there's an issue with banking apps on GrapheneOS, I don't believe that's actually the case. Many banking apps work just fine. In cases where other apps refuse to run, GrapheneOS has compatibility toggles. After toggling those on, many banking apps that complain start working again.

In other cases, banks add Play Integrity checks to their apps, which is a more complex subject. In short, many banking apps check for the basic integrity verdict, which GrapheneOS can get. In other cases, the checks are not implemented properly, and GrapheneOS has a toggle which often gets those apps to work. Finally, a very small number of banking apps require the strong integrity verdict and the apps will refuse to run on GrapheneOS.

Although there are no statistics about this, it does seem that a majority of banking apps work or can be made to work with different compatibility toggles.

It's not a banking app, but there are definitely apps that don't work on GrapheneOS that can't be made to work. A friend of mine is "required" to use Microsoft Authenticator for his work MFA, which won't run. He's looking at having to carry another phone.

I have to use the awful thing, too, so if I go to GrapheneOS next year when, hopefully, a non-Google phone supports it, I'll have to carry two phones. Ugh.

> That is why we have the good old WWW for.

We can use AI to take back the entire tech stack.

Every moat, every walled garden, every infrastructure piece can be rebuilt with AI.

We're seeing it with desktop apps, with games. It will happen to infrastructure and platforms. I'm itching at the opportunity to build open cloud primitives and P2P social protocols.

We don't need big tech anymore. We just need to be able to run our models.

Great for local stuff but won't help for remote services like banks when they rely on hardware attestation unfortunately.

Perhaps in a year's time, AIs can run fault injectors and devise hardware exploits too.

I want to see every *aaS’s functionality required to be offered -on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms- as an API

Who is Ford to tell me I can’t have a widget for each of my ford EVs visible at the same time? Or even that the single-car widget they do allow has has to be four times bigger than I want it to be, and waste screen real estate on dead space and things that I don’t want?

the network (~~internet~~ Business interests)

Can you imagine of those "de-banking" people actually existed and could read?

Yes, because GrapheneOS completely controls app installation and google play services is just an optional module.

Not at all. The app that is enforcing the change is a privileged Google app. Even if someone tried installing it on GrapheneOS, it wouldn't be able to do anything like remove apps, block installation, or disable apps.

And my experience has been that it's frequently harder to sidestep Google's bullshit on GrapheneOS because you don't have as much control of your phone, in the interest of security.

Honestly at this point, I'm just gonna start transitioning to Ubuntu Touch. The Android experiment has run its course.

What you're saying doesn't make any sense. I literally just said that GrapheneOS isn't affected.

The narrative that GrapheneOS is so focused on security that it affects usability, especially given the context, is nonsense. The change that's being discussed here doesn't affect GrapheneOS or other non-GMS operating systems. The only affected OSes are the ones that install Google apps with privileged permissions.

If you want to switch to something else, go ahead. GrapheneOS is still a better overall choice.

That is not the case. It is significantly easier to the point it is entirely optional. GrapheneOSs privacy and security features do not make avoiding google more difficult.

On stock OSs, google signs major portions of the OS and is highly privileged, which is impossible to sidestep.

Optional is obviously easier than impossible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com