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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

- Don't use Apple. Or Google.

People love to smugly suggest this useless advice like there aren’t literal public services from governments around the world that are being tied to these platforms, let alone the many private companies which gate access to their goods and services behind apps on proprietary devices.

To say nothing of the fact that well-adjusted humans need to communicate with friends and family, and many times that also practically requires being on these platforms as well.

Someone has to be the stick in the mud, right? I personally enjoy being that guy that doesn’t have a smartphone and causing problems in every government office / institution that assumes everyone has a smartphone, it’s like I’m a pioneer on the frontier :)

E-stim addicts will rationalize their slavery to a small rock in their pocket and sing grand songs about how it’s a curse but they need it. Like all addicts, they are not capable of rationally assessing the utility of the dependence object, and they’ll start carting out all sorts of silly things and gesturing vaguely “See this washing machine? Yep, it needs the rock, that’s why I keep my rock on me and charged at all times”

Reality is that you are the one paying the price, you will spend 45 minutes extra at the office when you could have spent it with your family or friends or playing soccer.

Time is the most precious thing in life, you’ll never be able to buy it back so you may want to reconsider long-term.

This also applies to protesting, activism, politics... It's not that you're wrong, it is in fact time that you could've spent playing soccer. But if everyone just turned their back and played soccer, the world would be a much darker place

That did happen and the world is a much darker place.

Pretty sure I'm getting >10x returns on my time for the minor inconveniences I suffer, most people sacrifice a double digit percent of their time on Earth to the device in their pocket.

I think it's because they're usually not well-adjusted humans, they live in a fantasy (basement) world that is not realistic.

Rude, not to mention this reads as "resistance is futile, just obey in advance".

You don't have to obey, but not doing so I think definitely puts you into most people's "not well-adjusted" camp... whether you think that's a good thing or not is a different issue I suppose. Lots of people in history who ended up being right were treated similarly...

And I really meant to write "not seen as well-adjusted" above... wasn't trying to say that anyone actually is or not.

I know you think it's rude, my apologies and I wasn't trying to be... just pointing out that people are still going to think it's weird and "not normal" to go to such "extremes" that most people don't, no matter how right they are.

If it was be that simple. In that case I would have to go to the bank for every transaction/payment I want to initiate online. Banking app doesn't work for jailbroken devices. Using PC to access banks website works, but transactions still require 2FA and they don't support any other 2FA flow except the one in the app.

There's always a workaround. There are banks with far less annoying root checking and you can just switch. Many banks allow SMS or a physical authenticator for web banking or 3DS 2FA. There are also many was to bypass root detection. If your main problem is 3DS 2FA for online card payments, get a proxy card.

"you can just switch" and yet then you have to contact X people and change Y contracts that are related to your prior bank account. It is not that simple.

Plus nothing ensures the bank you switch to won't up their "defenses" in a week.

I never said it was trivial, I said it was possible. In many places, it's actually very easy. In others it takes some work, but we're talking about de-googling your life, having to put in some work is already implied.

At least around here, I can walk into a bank, sign a few papers, then that bank coordinates with my old bank to transfer all my direct debits, move all my money and notify all my periodic creditors (employer, social security, tax office...). Peer-to-peer payments (like splitting bills with friends) are usually done by alias (phone number or email) on our instant payment scheme, not by IBAN, and my new bank will take care of rerouting that too. And if for whatever reason someone has my old IBAN and tries to send me money in the future, they'll get a rejection and will just have to ask me for my new one, no big deal.

As for "in a week", come on, you're just being intentionally annoying. Obviously there's no guarantee. If they don't have root detection now, after everyone has had it for a decade, there's probably a reason and they won't implement it any time soon. And if you're just supremely unlucky and they actually do it right after you switch, oh well, you wasted and afternoon. Definitely less time wasted than trying all the million different root hiding techniques that probably don't work anymore.

But you don’t mind paying more and having a worse service IRL when you could just buy a cheap Pixel phone with GrapheneOS on the side ?

Think of it like a car key. You wouldn’t have a crusade against car keys right ?

Wait what? Who is paying what? What service is worse? Car keys?? I genuinely, honestly, have no idea what you're talking about.

Some cars don't come with keys any more - you have to use your phone and the cloud.

Which is good, right? One less thing to lose.

/s I hope

Soon the cars are going to drive away on their own, so what's with the keys anyway ?

> Some cars don't come with keys any more

Can you name one?

> There's always a workaround.

And the workaround is always far more work than I want to do, for virtually no upside for me.

Tragedy of the commons in a nutshell.

You don't have to go to the bank for every transaction, you can just go there once to close out your account and open one somewhere that doesn't require that.

Depends though what you mean by "do not use Google". Having an Android phone with a Google account logged in will not affect you much. If they would block one account you just create another.

Having all your emails on Gmail and used for external services (bank, insurances, etc) is a different story though. I prefer to pay my email provider, at least they will care a bit more than they do for a free account...

I'm surprised, most banks I've come across force sms or phone-call 2fa only. A rare few allow generic TOTP authenticators, and maybe one or two has an app as an option. And I've only come across one bank that detects and warns for root access. Is there no "jailbreak hide" on ios?

In Poland it's SMS OTPs, bank app (heavily recommended and in some cases enforced by the bank) or additionally paid physical TOTP token devices. And almost all banks throw a hissy fit once you have some sort of vector of root detection left open.

This heavily depends on the country.

Or Microsoft.

Stay as far away from BigIT as you can. Linux or BSD are there for many good reasons. This is another one.

Other than Android, what viable Linux options exist for mobile devices?

What is your definition of viable in this context?

Can run the Android or iOS apps people need for banking, shopping, flights, payment, parking, etc

What we want is probably platform agnostic PWAs that will run on any device with a browser.

We will never have freedom as long as were forced to choose between Google and Apple walled gardens.

The whole purpose of these apps is to only run on certain specified devices, so PWA won't work.

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