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Comment by kxyvr | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone had success getting any of these containers to work with a camera?

Recently, my bank discontinued their website based deposit system for checks in favor of their app. I'm reluctant to keep an app with full access to my account on my phone, so a container system like Waydroid or Anbox would be great if I could just emulate the app when I need it. Has anyone else run into this issue and, if so, how have you dealt with it?

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I have been trying to get my banking software to work with both Anbox and Waydroid for the last couple of days. So far I've had no success with either. I've gotten other apps to run just fine but not any related to banking. These apps are extremely picky about the environment you run them in. At least the ones I'm working with require Google Play Services, which is proprietary and have to be ripped from an Android image (if you don't want to take a chance on some shady download). Even with Play services, my app still will not start. I'm thinking it could be related to how Anbox and Waydroid shares the kernel with the host OS, and therefor it may not look like valid Android to the apps.

perhaps the containerized environment looks like a rooted phone?

Due to vague security requirements most banking apps refuse to run if the phone has been rooted.

Install Android in a VMWare box. Works like a charm. No fuss, no hassle. And you can customize your network isolation as you want.

Most banking apps will require Google Play Services in order to work right. Currently, Waydroid does not offer that.

Perhaps banking apps refuse to run on devices which don't pass SafetyNet (which generally expects a TPM to be present, which I find appalling)?

Possibly very stupid question ahead: Can't the TPM be emulated?

I think TPMs are designed such that Google only trusts TPMs with private keys inaccessible to users (and bank account stealers, and Netflix downloaders), and which follow the instructions of your bank or Netflix (not the instructions of the user).

Do you have a taobao link for Google trusted TPM chips in reel?

The problem is (I think) you can't get a TPM to tell Google you're running on an unmodified phone (barring hardware mods or TPM exploits) if you have discrepancies from the unmodified phone visible in the CPU's RAM or flash.

FWIW/out of curiosity, I just tried poking the emulator that comes with Android Studio, and found an option (under "advanced settings") to route the emulated front or back camera to "Webcam0". This is out of the box on Debian.

While definitely a heavyweight approach (yay, installing all of Android Studio - but you also install an update tool), I can confirm it works. (And you can fish out and save the qemu invocation from `ps axfww`, then launch it directly without needing to start anything else, although I think the idiomatic approach is using the `emulator` command.)

The emulator is part of the android SDK so you don't need to install the full IDE if all you need is the emulator. You can just install the Android SDK standalone and use that to install additional images and start/stop devices.

I got by in similar circumstances with Android x86. Which is simply an android VM. The catch is that it's not ARM, which some apps lamented - but the app I needed worked just fine.

Android is actually pretty secure. If you trust Linux kernel (which I think you do since you trust lxc), then you can trust Android.

Erfan is finishing up on camera fixes soon. Updates should be pushed this weekend sometime.

What about using last year's phone for banking etc?

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