This removes the risk of this being abused to compromise the data of stolen devices or evil maid attacks unless a user that knows what they are doing has explicitly opted themselves into that risk.
Re-imaging with a rooted image is not acceptable because this also reduces the device's security by prevent OTA updates!
Gated community is broken when the end user cannot improve the security of the device above and beyond the lack polices of Google and Apple. For instant there should be no reason my device ever communicates with organizations I do not support such as Facebook or X-Twitter. X-Twitter is often used as command and control service in plain site.
It is not just out-wards communicate to monitor but in-wards too. I've used Zone Alarm in the past at an international company to help find the infected servers and computers that where serving up viruses and other malware.
*I would argue that the "Gated Community" analogy is flawed. A real world gated community still allows for the home owner to improve the security. By installing cameras, security system, and guards. Apple & Google prevent such actions.
At the moment, I just run GrapheneOS and don't bother with any modification. It is not worth the hassle. I've already had my bank account locked out because a Google Store-bought Pixel phone was flagged as "stolen", probably due to some attestation measure (they could not tell me why). They recommended that I purchase a new phone.
Attestation requirements are only going to become more prevalent. I predict that in a few years basically all proprietary software for Android will require attestation.
So... you may still be able to unlock the device and make it yours, but you'll also be locked out of the ever expanding and ever-more-isolated walled garden.
If you can live off of GrapheneOS and F-Droid, that's great, but for a lot of users this won't be a real choice, because you increasingly need proprietary software for access to real things in the physical world (i.e. I needed to install a special app for event tickets recently).
Magisk exists, yes, but it's a flimsy temporary solution. It only works because it's able to lie to Google that your device doesn't support hardware attestation. As soon as Google starts requiring that all devices support hardware attestation, it will stop working.
And there are some real strong reasons why you benefit from this sort of ability, such as preventing folks from cheating in competitive games. I can't say that all uses seem to have good reasons to use it, but that seems like more of a vote with your wallet sort of situation. Perhaps the play store should also have stricter requirements on acceptable use of attestation and ensure they are upheld.
It's not the software, it's that the hardware itself, that I bought to own, still serves someone else in a way that's detrimental to my interests, and that can't be overridden because those stupid encryption keys used to sign attestation reports are burned into the silicon and only accessible to that TrustZone hypervisor that can't be unlocked.
> And there are some real strong reasons why you benefit from this sort of ability, such as preventing folks from cheating in competitive games.
Maybe playing such games on general-purpose devices is a bad idea to begin with. You know, consoles are already locked down pretty tight. But then there are PCs that have no hardware roots of trust at all yet you can play anything on them and sometimes even compete with console players. So go figure.
It's an invasion of my privacy.
If Americans had anything like BankID or MitID which would refuse to run on their devices and they would be prevented from paying a bill, transferring money, buying tickets, or reading their mail they would go apeshit in 5 seconds.
Some apps are no longer optional in the world we are living in.
They require hardware certification for the Pixel Screenshots app... and for anything that uses Gemini Nano (Call recorder summary, weather, pixel screenshots, etc).
The problem though is that rooting by itself is not that useful when a lot of apps use remote attestation to deny you service if you're rooted.
We don't just need root access, we need undetectable root access.
I'm typing this on a rooted phone where all (banking) apps work just fine. All it takes is downloading an app (magisk) and add apps to a list that need to have rooting hidden.
Worth noting that this could change with every update. It's an unstable situation right now, which is undesirable.
For that reason, e.g. the GrapheneOS team isn't employing measures to fake compliance at all. They'd really like to get SafetyNet compliance for their operating system (you need that to get Google Pay/Wallet to work), but funamentally can't get it. Right now, they could just fake it, but that's not guaranteed to work reliably, forever (and doing so would probably threaten their official BasicIntegrity compliance).
At some point the argument morphs from 'I should be able to do whatever I want with my device' to 'I should be able to access your service/device with whatever I want'.
The fact that Google allows this shows that
1. Apple could do it with zero security impact on anyone who doesn't opt in
2. They could keep any service-based profit source intact
But they still would never do it. Because it's not only service based profit they want to protect. They want to restrict customers from running competitor's software on their hardware, to ensure they get their cut.
I'm not demanding to be able to log in to your service/device and replace IIS with Apache on it. I'm just demanding to be able to access it as a normal user with Firefox instead of Chrome.