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Comment by oytis | Hacker News Reader

The most important question missing from the FAQ is whether bank apps, government ID apps, etc. will work with this phone.

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Everything hinges on app support.

Smartphone apps have unfortunately become a hard requirement for basic day-to-day activities. Most companies offer them only for iOS and Android.

If your smartphone can't run the vast majority of apps, it is basically dead on arrival. Nobody is going to buy it when they need to carry another phone anyways.

The only way around this is either emulation (which Google is trying very hard to sabotage) or heavy-handed regulation forcing app developers to also support niche platforms. I don't think either option is likely to work.

>heavy-handed regulation forcing app developers to also support niche platforms.

should work for banking and governmental applications, especially as those should already have the workflow in place to support niche platforms.

They don’t need to specifically support “niche platforms,” which will never happen anyway. They just need to support the one, universal platform every device (be it phone, laptop or desktop) can always access, the web.

And they don't want to, because that experiment ran for around 20 years and resoundingly failed. Turns out it's really hard to stop the bottom quintile of users from entering all their credentials into just about any website that looks similar to what they are used to - and then their identity/money is just gone.

Stopping those users without a trusted authority deciding which electron-wrapped websites are genuine is an unsolved problem, I think.

If the app truly just plumbed a webview and cert verification - which has been doable for over a decade - it would be very portable and this wouldn't be a problem.

The apps don't just do that though; they call into and use an awful lot of the system APIs for user tracking / semi-native experience / biometrics and probably a whole host of other things. Its the incompatibility in these that drags compatibility.

> The apps don't just do that though; they call into and use an awful lot of the system APIs for user tracking / semi-native experience / biometrics and probably a whole host of other things. Its the incompatibility in these that drags compatibility.

Both can be true. Many (most?) online banking apps are just shitty wrapped javascript, that also uses an awful lot of system APIs.

I'm using a couple of different banks, and not a single one has anything close to a native app. Because how nice would that be? Responsive interface (since it doesn't need to load every single view from the server), instant search over your transactions (since the DB can be cached locally), instant access to all the PDFs in your inbox... but no.

> Smartphone apps have unfortunately become a hard requirement for basic day-to-day activities.

I've never owned a smartphone in my life and are not planning on getting one, and I'm going through life just fine.

Maybe you don't live in any European country. 2FA with cell phone has become compulsory for most banking procedures in Spain, to the point that I can even no longer assist my parents without being present there with them. Even when there is a web app, this randomly forces the user to confirm identity via phone. Every day this extends to more and more official proceduress these days (e.g. loging to EU pages, regional government paperwork, access to hospital records and prescriptions...), and unfortunately it seems to me that the phone as official ID might be the future. In this scenario, projects like this one cannot be really useful without some standardization or layer that makes it acceptable by the government.

In two banks I was in in last 20 years before and after Payment Services Directive implementation, I was a secondary user to the account. I could do almost anything on the account which saved my mother lots of stress. It's enough for her to check balance and outgoing transactions and rest lies in my hands. Wouldn't that help you as well?

In Poland we have a rather well-functioning digital services platform. Tho, two weeks ago news outlets raised a small tantrum that our digital identity wallet application may be non-compliant with the upcoming EU standards. But as for now, once you log into the application (there are few ways - ID card with chip, 3rd party login by bank and so on), the session is kept for a year. After that's done you can log on desktops by QR code or pass data from app to app.

mObywatel app tries to include all the essentials: from digital ID copy (identity confirm, validation for you and someone else) your DNI-equivalent protection (won't allow to process your personal information in some cases). There's healthcare services handling (prescriptions, but we also have a dedicated app), inbox/outbox for official matters, payments and taxes, section for car and vehicles (penalty points, accident reporting), environment (reporting accidents, air quality, flood alerts) and travel (rail tickets wallet, tips and warning for traveling destinations - atm it shows that Spain is on 4th level terrorist threat). Tbh, it's way better than used to be few years ago with complex login flow that could break midway.

It's all convenient stuff but older generations are already digitally marginalized and we may indeed head into the future where we won't be able to do anything without a smartphone, in both real and digital life.

Many banks restrict the number and capabilities of secondary users. In the end I had to get a power of attorney, but for me observing these changes is just a warning. I see a pervasive use of a phone as means of authentication and the compulsory nature of hardware-bound digital IDs is penetrating our society. That is a barrier for elderly people but also for other groups, specially when those requirements are not accompanied by standards (i.e. why does a French person need to get a new ID to work with Spanish bureaucracy) and also because the phone itself is an unsubsidized cost. Not to mention when one is travelling to countries with locked networks, losing the phone or, closer to the topic here,the lack of trust on generic phone platforms, which enforces a duopoly (Google Android + iOS) preventing new technologies to enter the market.

We actually moved to Europe a number of years ago, and have lived in two different countries here. In my experience, there's often alternatives for 2FA that they'll tell you about once they know that you do not own a phone.

Don't know about Spain, but in France we can be sent codes via SMS for things like 3d secure.

Although I haven't held one in my hands, apparently there's Flutter support for Harmony OS. There are quite a lot of mobile apps implemented in Flutter and Dart, and platform support for alternative phone OSs looks doable.

There is a Wiki maintained by users. In short, it depends :)

https://sailfishos.wiki/books/compatibility-list-of-android-...

The need to support apps - when you are constantly internet-connected anyhow - is becoming less and less important. You can now pin many websites to your phone’s “desktop” and have them run identically to native apps, and sometimes with even better start-up performance.

So long as a service is being provided identically on a mobile website as it is in a native app, you can pin that website and get just the same experience without needing a native app.

My bank officially forbids access from a mobile browser (but it still works by selecting "Desktop site" in Firefox).

It's not a huge hassle to keep another phone around for these things, if you really want to have a Jolla phone.

Of course they cannot answer this in the FAQ, because they have no insight into how thousands of different banks and other third parties will make their decisions on which devices to allow.

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