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Comment by scorpioxy | Hacker News Reader

So for Australia, what can someone do?

I don't believe that regulation these days can stand against corporate interests. I have seen this happen many times already. So what can I as a consumer do? The two practical options seem to be either Apple or Google.

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Its our government plan, too.

Controlled distribution:

https://onlinesafety.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/CLEAN...

Controlled hardware:

https://onlinesafety.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/CLEAN...

GrapheneOS is probably the answer?

Attestation means you probably will need an Apple/Google device in addition to the GrapheneOS one:

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...

Letting the app developers know that it doesnt improve security and that it blocks you from using the app and it enforcing a monopoly sometimes works.

I/We managed to get two apps (banking and eID) to remove SafetyNet attestation through complaining a lot.

I'm assuming those apps are still proprietary and probably privacy violating?

> I'm assuming those apps are still proprietary and probably privacy violating?

Yes. Not sure about "privacy violating" though. But since its not open source I have to trust them...

Only a tiny subset of apps ban GrapheneOS. Several such as Swissquote recently decided to permit it via hardware attestation. Swizerland's government ID app is also going to be permitting it. We're working on getting more apps using the Play Integrity API to do that, but it would be better if the EU and other governments required permitting alternatives which are at least as secure as what Google permits (currently an extremely low bar, since they permit many years without privacy/security patches and only check for licensing Google Mobile Services).

As we're talking Australia... All our banks require Play Integrity. Commbank, ANZ, Bendigo, etc. All of them.

MyGov, Centrelink, ATO and other government apps all require it.

The "tiny subset", in Australian terms covers, "things you are required to use".

A very large subset of important/mandatory apps though, like banking or government apps. You shouldn't be asking them to allow GrapheneOS, but asking them to stop using attestation, so people can use their choice of OS, even a custom one that they wrote, no matter how "insecure" that might be.

Yes, Evil Corp is doing bad things so let's switch to project that is tightly coupled to the Evil Corp's hardware.

I heard there are Linux based phones but I haven't tried any

Expensive (well, except pine) and behind but i buy them anyway, as I cannot stand this corporate crap.

What is the most tolerable of these phones, in your experience?

The Purism ones. They work mostly fine - outdated hardware sure, but it is all fast enough and works and is very usable as workstation of course depending on what you do. I do some rust, go, node dev and it works very well when plugged into a larger screen.

I've messed around with funky phones, and after having an emergency call fail on two different ones, I've decided not to mess about with them anymore (GrapheneOS on some random pixel and a funky e-ink phone). Maybe it works great on whatever linux phone you mean but my path forward has looked more like just always using secondhand androids until I can install fdroid anymore, and then just using a linux phone tethered to a dumbphone that can hotspot. Finding out you can't call emergency services when you really super duper need to is something I never want to risk happening to me again.

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