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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

What about banking apps?

This seems to be mainly brought up by people concerned they'd lose banking apps than people who actually have issues. It's rooted phones that often get blocked, whereas those that run LineageOS/microG without rooting are largely fine.

Yes, there are certainly banks that block more aggressively, but if you look at e.g. iodéOS's forums most of them work fine: https://community.iode.tech/t/banking-finance-and-insurance-...

Anecdotally, I've also seen a lot of stories of people reaching out to support about overblocking actually seeing success. Apparently there are often enterprise reasons for the block and it literally just needs a customer to complain for engineering to be able to act.

My primary banks apps, and websites, work fine on Graphene, with the exception of anything NFC payment related. I do miss that convenience, but I still have a debit card and cash as needed.

I’ve heard banking apps with built in NFC payments should work but I can’t get it to go.

There are real problems with banking apps on graphene. Chase app won’t launch at all the us bank app nags every 15seconds that it needs some play services privilege that’s not even in the list. Maybe they’ll work once I tear play services back out.

I don't know about LineageOS, but there is crowd-sourced list of banks that work with GrapheneOS: https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report

More info here: https://grapheneos.org/usage#banking-apps

My credit union wasn't on the list, but it works.

Many do require passing Play Integrity at the basic level and/or having a locked bootloader, etc. In these cases, it works well with GrapheneOS, but not necessarily with LineageOS. If you end up using microG to do it, you just gave Google privileged access to your phone (by microG downloading/using DroidGuard).

"Before explaining my setup in more detail, I want to clarify, that I still use a second phone. It is an older stock Android phone, with all Google stuff on it. I need still need to use banking and other apps, that don't work on custom roms."

use a bank that provides a website?

website says to authenticate with app, now what?

In the case of HSBC I said the app would not work on my phone and they send me a security widget.

Lots of HN readers located in countries outside of the US would find your answer infeasible (even the bank website requires their app for authentication, and this is the case for every bank).

To expand on what the posters mentioned: HN is an international community, and the USA is an outlier in having an ample choice of banks. Many countries only have 3–5 usable banks, and all of them require a phone app for 2FA authentication in order to log into their website. Moreover, it happens that banks remove certain functionality from their websites, so it can only be done through the app.

And beyond that, in some countries the strong authentication for logging into government services has been implemented through banks, and so one cannot visit one’s local tax-authority or healthcare portal without a phone that runs the bank app.

Even in countries where you have a wide choice of banks (the UK, for example) more and more banks are pushing people to use mobile apps. We have the problem of the government and other businesses and organisations pushing people to use apps.

One example is my local bus company only selling certain tickets (monthly ones, for example) on the app. If you do not want to use an app you pay per trip which can be a LOT more expensive (several times as much for a daily commute).

Sounds like discrimination, no consumer's rights associations to take them to court?

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