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Comment by HenriTEL | Hacker News Reader

The problem here seems to be that the phone is detected as rooted, not specifically that it's running grapheneOS. But I agree that it's a big problem. That's how you end up in a situation where google has full control from hardware to final apps like on iphones. When devs assume that everybody is using the stock android with google services enabled.

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GrapheneOS is not rooted. The phone not being rooted is part of the GrapheneOS' security model.

I assume the issue is it failing the deeper play integrity check which is about it not being "Google approved."

It isn't due to the Play Integrity API. That shows a notification on GrapheneOS with a toggle for blocking it to work around it for services not enforcing providing a result. If that was the issue, the original poster would have known from the notification. The issue ended up being PayPal shipping incorrect anti-tampering code incompatible with secure spawning. The original poster figured that out and got it working by disabling the per-app secure spawning toggle.

How did we let "rooting" become some evil thing?

It's normal to have root (or Administrator) on your devices. After all, they are yours. They don't belong to the device manufacturer. You should have full access to your own devices by default.

Only recently did we somehow normalize the idea that the user should not be the ultimate decider over their own devices.

We've already progressed from "the user should not be" to "the user should never be". Perhaps we will even grow out of calling it "their own devices" eventually. If they can brick it remotely it kinda already isn't really yours?

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