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Comment by boxed | Hacker News Reader

> Governments are cementing a monopoly they claim to oppose

Duopoly but yea. Because there is no third alternative. Microsoft failed/gave up with Windows Phone. The people trying to fix secure government services can't really tackle that issue, but the systems needs to be built now anyway.

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There are viable third alternatives which do not require building a full smartphone stack. The national eID in Denmark, MitID, is an app "protected by" Play Integrity, but at least there are two non-smartphone alternatives available in the form of either a TOTP code generator or a FIDO2 chip which you can get for free if you can't or won't buy a smartphone.

Age verification solutions could also be built on dedicated hardware tokens, even though the tokens required to build a ZKP or blind signature based solution may not be available off the shelf right now.

> but the systems needs to be built now anyway.

I question that premise.

They can't tackle issue oft establishing a 3rd popular mobile operating system, true. But they could support Desktop Linux or AOSP.

Last I checked Android was OSS and there's plenty of clones without any Google BS. Heck I'm using one now

Yeah but if the wallet requires Google Pay Services attestation the AOSP based clones won't be able to run it unless they can spoof it somehow.

My argument was that EU can have own phone OS completely unconnected with Google. EU can make own attestation and even ban Google attestation in EU.

We don't need to reinvent the wheel and create completely new OS

Because that's the security posture systems like these needs.

Windows Phone wouldn't be much help here, still an US company.

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