I have moved most of the my finance activity to it, along with my license and passport. I would never trust a Google device with this much, and the convenience has been profound in a few circumstances.
I would relegate any intrusive apps here, and happily deny them cross-app tracking privileges.
Dont let their boilerplate responses fool you, tools like play integrity only serve to push anticompetitive practices. The claims about not being able to support GOS are nonsense, and all they did was break existing support.
My take is that they were trying to block rooted phones and/or custom ROMs of questionable origin and GrapheneOS just became collateral damage because all these companies do go the minimal route of using Play Integrity. GrapheneOS supports remote attestation through AOSP APIs, in fact, they have a page about it.
I think it's worth letting this be heard. GrapheneOS has > 400,000 users and is rapidly growing. Breaking things is not going to affect 5 people anymore, but thousands, ten thousands or hundreds of thousands, depending on what the app is.
There are only bad reasons for them to do that. End users don't get compromised that way in reality, but it does mean they might convince the app to do something that's bad for profits.
GrapheneOS is also not responsible for bugs in this app. Any bug reports coming from GOS are likely to be from the hardening toggles, which uncover bugs in the app. This is the apps fault, and these bugs still exist on other OSs. It should be resolved for the benefit of all users.
"Support" is such an overloaded and vague word in the software industry. What does it mean for a company to "support" an app/os configuration?
1. They deliberately target that app/os configuration, QA tests it, and answer customer support requests about it.
2. They target the configuration, QA tests it, but it's offered without customer support.
3. They target the configuration, but only release an untested build, use at your own risk.
4. They don't target the configuration at all, but the builds they do release happen to work on the configuration, totally unacknowledged by the company.
5. They don't target the configuration, and deliberately sabotage their application such that un-targeted configurations are actively blocked. Only adversarial users who hack the software are able to use it.
Too many companies say: "We can't do 1 because we don't 'support' it, therefore we must do 5!"
About the only time it doesn't work is when the game uses an anticheat system that intentionally blocks Linux. I can even see where the game devs are coming from when it comes to competitive games; cheating ruins the game for other players, and there's no way to prevent certain kinds of cheating without trusting the client to a degree.
I can't see any reasonable and user-respecting place VW could be coming from intentionally blocking access from open systems.
Because of those bug reports, very few may be specific to the non-mainstream OS? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28978086
If you choose to use something like GrapheneOS, you are signing up for the fact that almost no one will test on your platform and plenty of things will be broken.
Hypothetically, if GrapheneOS wanted to become a certified Android, it would probably not be blocked on technical reasons, only that becoming certified (last time a contract was leaked) requires running privileged Google Play Services (which is less secure) and pre-installing a bunch of Google apps that should not be uninstallable.
How is that not anti-competitive?
This site talks at length about running businesses, identifying your target market and focusing hard on them. The same thing applies to other aspects of software.
If I ran a cross-platform app (built on Electron or whatever) and a certain platform made up 0.1% of my users but 20% of my customer support team's time, I'd stop supporting that platform. It's literally not worth the effort. And I wouldn't just let it rot (that would keep the customer support issues going), I'd block it.
> GrapheneOS is a privacy and security focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility [https://grapheneos.org/]
Tools such as play integrity are illegal. Using anticompetitive and monopolistic tools is not the right of application developers.
> Using anticompetitive and monopolistic tools is not the right of application developers.
Please talk to an actual lawyer before making legal claims, because to be blunt it's very clear you don't know what many of those terms mean in a legal context. VW is not a "monopoly". They have no obligation to allow the use of their software on platforms they don't want.
I do know what these terms mean in a legal context. I am claiming that play integrity is an anticompetitive and monopolistic tool, of which VW decided to use. I am not claiming VW is a monopoly. What you are claiming is their right to do, is not their right at all, and is illegal.
The issue is not that this application isnt tested on GOS, its that an anticompetitive, illegal tool is being used to ban non-certified OSs when these apps would work perfectly otherwise.
Obviously VW broke the app for GrapheneOS (or any other custom ROM) on purpose, and ironically, things usually works fine for custom ROMs than some Chinese OEM customized ROMs, and when it works, it means the developer went extra miles to implement workaround to cater the flawed OS.[1]
[1]: ref: Years of Android community experience
It can even make you a great/better one…
Maybe then app developers should be mandated to open fully their server-side protocols, so people can create apps for platforms that are not supported by default. No more undocumented APIs, anybody can get an API key, no API serving limits!
Fuck that.