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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

Snapchat refuses to let you access their services at all via browser. And most banks offer you a restricted set of functionality via browser, e.g., no taking pictures of checks to deposit (in fact, I can't think of any banks that do let you do that via browser).

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You have to do the open source phone first, and help convince others, before the banks and snapchats will support you, not the other way around. It's normally a small sacrifice, but the payoff is fundamental to a free future.

You make it sound like the banks and Snapchat would have to do work for them to support me, when the opposite is true. The community already has compatibility layers that work for most apps, but those companies go out of their way to do extra work to make sure their apps don't work in them.

Yeah they're shitty. That's why maybe you shouldn't financially support ecosystems that you don't like just to use apps that are actively hostile to you. You don't need those things.

The problem with not using Snapchat is the network effect: you miss out on socialization when you're the only one in your friend group that isn't on it.

The problem with not using those banks is that I don't think there's any banks that aren't hostile like that, and keeping all of your money under a mattress is a worse choice than compromising on this principle.

This is HN so I'll be slaughtered for this reply, but someone definitely tried to fix the banks issue a little over a decade ago.

But yeah, fair enough! I choose to just not chat to those people, but I totally get that it's not that easy for some.

You choose not to chat with your friend group?

The goofs trying to communicate via Snapchat, yeah.

Snapchat works on google free /e/ OS.

Snapchat makes you pass SafetyNet to be able to log in, and passing SafetyNet requires a signed response from Google's servers. Are you sure it isn't only working with a workaround like signing in on a stock Android device, and then copying the authentication information over?

I just installed it and it works. Got microG to thank for that i guess.

What a wonderfully ripe area for disruption.

You're going to disrupt Snap by writing a more free version of it?

I didn't know they open sourced their code.

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