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Comment by piaste | Hacker News Reader

Do you have the sandboxed Play Services installed? It works fine for me on Graphene (just checked).

That said, the recommendation I always give, and personally follow: keep a spare phone in a drawer somewhere, with official Android installed, a Google account, and use it exclusively for business purposes - banking, government services, and the email account you use for those (separate from the one you use for everything else). Nothing else, no messaging, socials, browsing, or games.

Then you're free to keep your personal phone FOSS and as private as you like, without fear of getting locked out of important stuff due to a crappy Google® SafetyNet® upgrade.

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> That said, the recommendation I always give, and personally follow: keep a spare phone in a drawer somewhere, with official Android installed, a Google account, and use it exclusively for business purposes - banking, government services, and the email account you use for those (separate from the one you use for everything else). Nothing else, no messaging, socials, browsing, or games.

Anything which doesn't support an alternative method (not involving a proprietary blessed google phone) of management should be illegal if it's government related and should be boycotted if it's not.

I certainly agree with the sentiment (I would trust-bust tech giants, and severely restrict advertising as a whole for being a negative-sum game).

Nevertheless, for living in this world while preserving your privacy, my advice stands. Separate the devices that you control, which you will use for personal and private purposes, from the devices that global corporations and institutions control, which you will use to access the services those institutions provide - services which, by definition, you would not control anyway.

It is far, far simpler than having to get proprietary, frequently-updated software to play nice inside a secure sandbox. If they do, great, but separate devices ensures it isn't a capital-P Problem for you if they stop.

(FWIW, I lived in three different European countries over the past decade and so far the governments all offered TOTP-based web alternatives to their apps. When it comes to private banking, only one (Lunar) was available only via app, but it was also the only one that ran without Play Services.)

> It is far, far simpler than having to get proprietary, frequently-updated software to play nice inside a secure sandbox. If they do, great, but separate devices ensures it isn't a capital-P Problem for you if they stop.

What I am saying (and what I do) is that it's far simpler still to just not rely on anything where this might be the case.

If my bank turned around tomorrow and said I can't use their website to manage my account, I would not attempt to get their app working on my phone, I would switch bank.

Yes I have. I'm on Pixel 6, just verified again and still no luck for me :-(

Thanks for the recommendation tho - you reminded me that I have some old Xiaomi phone that should be able to run it still!

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