I use GrapheneOS, but if you as a bank want to gate access to my money via some kind of technology, you better be including it as part of the account.
For example, HSBC continues to let me manage my bank account via the web browser, and continues to offer a battery powered hardware token as the means of authentication.
I let you hold my money, for whatever reason. Why do you expect me to be your distributed infrastructure provider? I am not going to let you require that I run your proprietary malware in order to access my own money.
The idea where you are effectively _expected_ to constantly provide free compute for companies to run their complete garbage on hardware _you own_ just for the privilege of giving them money is one of the most absurd trend in recent times.
I'd say that JS webapps are the same but at least there you run things on your terms in a sandbox that you can inspect and look at the requests, and there's no effective enclave carved out of your hardware (except for EME but that's another topic for another day and I'd be complaining if banks started to use it too).
You might be overthinking it. Most people want to use their phone for convenience, and if an app allows them to remove just one step in their banking activities, they'll probably do that.
As for the second part (separate authentication methods), sure, would be rather problematic if they require you to have a phone, but that's a completely separate and different issue.
On GrapheneOS you can install your bank app in a different user profile, and run Google Play sandboxed, so this scenario of a bank app doesn't result in anyone having access to your other information.
HSBC pressure you into using the app and I don't think there is a way back to the battery powered OTP device. At least not that I know in the UK. I resisted until the battery failed and they basically make you go into the branch and then plead why you can't use a smartphone. got sick of this dance after 3 years
I got a replacement widget recently, the website pushes the app but when I asked in branch they gave me one without even asking my name. I had to wait on the phone to register the new serial number, maybe I could've done that in person too, but it lasted years (and multiple phones) so I don't mind too much
Maybe that works in the some countries, but among the 3-4 mainstream banks in my country, making that threat when you are anything less than an unusually high earner by local standards (and perhaps a customer of ancillary investment services) is just going to be met with "Fine, we'll close it then." You might be overestimating just how much banks need any one average person's custom. Also, by local cultural standards, making such threats to a business for the sake of obtaining better customer service is over-the-top Karen behavior, so you have already lost when you do that.
Most of those devices are interchangeable, so if you have one from NatWest, Barclays etc it will probably work with your card. It's also possible to replaec the battery on most of them.
My bank pestered me so much to use their app that I eventually caved in. Ironically, they claim it's more secure than normal internet banking from the PC with 2-factor authorization, even though they send the SMS token for in-app transfers to the same phone as the app...it makes no sense.
>Why do you expect me to be your distributed infrastructure provider?
...You realize that we're talking about banks, right? Institutions operating on a fractional reserve? Take your money, use it as collateral to print 10x their holdings in interest-bearing debt? Free to restrict your withdrawals and bail-in funds from your account to save their own hides? Those banks.
The Occupy Wall Street and Bitcoin dudes and dudettes had it right, which is why they were carefully marginalized and appropriated, respectively.
In my experience with UK banks & financial institutions, GrapheneOS support can be roughly divided into four types.
None. Explicitly banned. And, though I feel bad for saying it, I can't blame them. If some idiot roots their phone and downloads malware, the bank may be responsible for refunding them. I can see why they don't want that headache.
Some. App works, but some functionality is unavailable. I've got a credit card app which works, but refuses to set up virtual cards or use "remember me". That's good enough for my use. Similarly, I had a merchant account which let me see my balance, but I couldn't use my phone as a credit card reader.
Works, but only in main profile. I'd rather keep financial things in a locked profile. But lots of banks disallow that.
Full. Everything works (although you may need to toggle some exploit protection off).
Some banks are reasonably good at letting you pass on technical queries to their developers - mostly the smaller ones. The nice thing about the UK banking sector is that it is trivial to move banks. So I switched accounts to providers which worked with my phone and let the old ones know why I was moving.
Without evidence that using an OS that isn't approved by Google or Apple actually correlates with a higher rate of account compromise or fraud, I do blame them for trying to force it on users.
I've done a couple casual web searches for such evidence and come up short. If somebody has good data on this, I don't think they're publishing it.
I'm pretty sure it's actually anti correlated: not because degoogled Androids are safer by themselves, but because the average user is way savier than the average Joe (which have an out of date Android full of unpatched security vulnerabilities, in the first place).
My theory is that they're trying to counter simulated phones. In the old days fraudsters would use their stolen credentials on a windows RDP rented from someone who sells fraud infra with clean IPs. I wouldn't be surprised if fraudsters have tried to develop an android based VM meant to look like a legitimate customer endpoint.
Though the most effective way to cut out that kind of fraud is to stop using SMS for authentication, which banks don't seem to be interested in doing.
That's my first instinct too. I've seen a claim that devices with root, which is distinct from degoogled, both of which are distinct from using a third-party Android distribution, have an increased probability of malware. I suspect that statistic includes things like secondary devices people use for cheating in pay-to-win games and the like.
Since that’s “likely” correlated (and a “likely” is often enough), a product manager will take the most optimal decision for themselves and the company - reject such use cases as unsupported. This is easier than to manage such an edge case for “a few” legitimate users.
Few orgs understand compliance. While there might be some compliance people at the org level, individual teams implementing features will need to have a good line to them. In the end, knowledge is siloed and everyone needs to deliver on time. So it’s easier to forbid with some controlled collateral damage than to permit with an uncontrolled downside variance. Just a derisking hedge.
Serving use cases that drift away a bit “too far away” from the average (+ some sigmas) use case is not economically justified for a product manager - their KPIs would deteriorate from such “altruism”. No one will care if a few low-margin customers can’t use the product.
If the banks were really so concerned about malware on the user's endpoint, and they had competent CTO, then they would write an app for Trezor or offer a Trezor with their own logo and app on it and users could sign transactions with it.
Trezors show on a screen to the user "this is the amount and where to be sent that you are signing for".
Malware with high privileges on a compromised user endpoint can bamboozle the user but a hardware wallet would catch that.
You are suggesting an entirely second piece of hardware when there are people in this thread claiming (IMO correctly) that many customers prefer an app over the browser because it's very mildly more convenient.
And there is a very large swath of banking customers who I wouldn't be surprised to learn that banks will earn less than $130 from over the course of a decade.
> ”If some idiot roots their phone and downloads malware, the bank may be responsible for refunding them.”
This obviously depends on jurisdiction, but how commonly is this actually the case?
I’ve thankfully never personally been on the receiving end of fraud or identity theft, but my impression is that here, everything that happens up until the point you tell your bank ”hey, uh, I think my account’s been compromised” is pretty much on you. I don’t think rooting your phone, installing a banking app from some umauthorized source et.c would be hard to construe as negligence.
In the UK, the bank is liable for any transactions on your account that you didn't approve. Doesn't matter that they thought you approved it because someone knew your pin, or compromised your device.
Unless the bank has reason to believe that you're either trying to defraud the bank, or where unduly careless with your banking credentials (and you have to be really careless to meet that bar in the eyes of the regulator and the courts), then they're expected to refund you.
I've seen banks refund £100ks to customers that were defrauded over many months via romance scams. There are cases ruling by the Financial Ombudsman forcing banks to refund customers to handed over their cards and PINs to carers that then stole money.
The general attitude of the law in the UK, the regulators, and the courts, is basically it's the banks responsibility to provide appropriate security, in a form that their customers can easily use and understand. If banks want to make it easy for customers to move and spend money, then the risks associated with that convenience accrue with the bank, not their customers.
Obviously banks work very hard to worm their way out of their responsibilities here. But if you use the consumer protection tools that exist in the UK, which are very easy to access, and which your bank is required to inform you of, then it's surprisingly easy to force a bank to refund you for any fraud you suffer.
I don't know anything about the actual legal responsibilities, but even there aren't any, a defrauded customer takes up support resources just having the conversation about it. Upset customers (regardless of how well placed that upset is) will complain about it in reviews etc.
A lot of people aren't able to distinguish "I got scammed" from "the bank took my money away".
>If some idiot roots their phone and downloads malware, the bank may be responsible for refunding them.
I keep reading this justification, and it doesn't make an ounce of sense to me.
first of all, the number of people who want to root their phones is a fraction of 1%. children, teenage girls, and senile boomers don't do that. the number of people with rooted phones who could fall for "hello sir, I am sir John Whiteman from Microsoft, you're phone have virus, sir, please do the needful install this a pee kaa, sir" is near zero.
second of all, phones get stolen all the time, and it would make sense to reduce liability by not providing apps at all.
> people who want to root their phones is a fraction of 1%. children, teenage girls…
If someone lies to them and tells them there is an app that lets them get free Roblox bucks or whatever, but first they have to root their phone, they will. If someone lies or makes an app that removes pimples or adds makeup in realtime, or something, but they make it only work on rooted phones, they will.
I did a rough estimate of all the people I know and the number of those people who would want to root their phone. It’s not a big number but it’s way bigger than “a fraction of 1%”.
And it’s a completely different demographic than those would would fall for the phone call scam, but it’s incredibly disingenuous of you to suggest that the only malware distribution vector is being tricked into installing an APK.
I know people who are interested in modding games, pirating software, and installing “cool” apps just for the novelty. I would argue the most likely reason those people installed malware is voluntarily, because they searched out a hacked version of Bloons Tower Defence. Not because they “needed to pay an outstanding Windows service bill”.
Question: In the UK, thanks open banking, couldn't you use a compatible bank like monzo and load all the other bank accounts via open banking into that single app?
Yes. Banks like Monzo allow you to import your other bank accounts into their app. I did it for a while, but ultimately I found it easier to just have separate apps for each. Most apps are very good and improving all the time, so usually one isn’t much better than the other.
I haven’t looked for a one-app-to-rule-them-all, but in principle it’s possible.
I think the UK banking sector is in rude health. It’s very competitive and it’s easy to move. The quality of the apps is very much part of any competitive advantage.
I have accounts with four uk banks and it’s trivial to manage them. It’s an example of legislation working really well.
Would anyone know why? My understanding of profiles is arguably very limited, but I always saw those as equivalent to device owner profile from app runtime standpoint.
I’m not very familiar with android because I don’t daily it, but I have an old Pixel 4 with GOS that I was using to evaluate GOS. I know for example that some MDMs don’t work on a secondary “Work” profile in GOS, despite it being one of the main use cases for secondary profiles. If I recall correctly, it was because of how some MDMs can be configured by the organization’s admin they require some handshake with the Owner profile that doesn’t work in GOS. you would have to install them on the owner profile defeating the point I think,
I have two to add: Works, but only every other app version. Second: works if the aosp keyboard or gboard are active but not with LeanType. Easy fix once you know, but that was not a fun time debugging.
> The nice thing about the UK banking sector is that it is trivial to move banks.
Are there countries where this is a hassle? Now I've only had personal banking accounts in ~3 countries (so far?), so maybe I'm in a bubble, but in none of the countries has "switching banks" been more than basically create a new account, start using new IBAN for incoming transfers, move direct debits to use new IBAN and start using new card(s). Those last two were even automatic in the last move I did for a lot of stuff. Is it typically more difficult than that in other countries?
There are countries where, as a result of mergers, banking is now down to 3-4 banks, and they all have the same Android requirements, so switching won't get one anywhere.
If those countries are in the EU, you have the right to use a bank based in another EU country. The traditional incumbents will likely demand an in-country residential address (in direct contradiction of EU law). Which leaves the internet-only neobanks. I believe the only FOSS-compatible option is Wise, which has a modern web offering and does not even require that you install a native app. I understand N26 does, but it may work with Graphene. By contrast Revolut is a privacy-invading walled garden and should be avoided at all costs.
If you are not a citizen, but an immigrant, it could be very true in some parts of the world.
I have a living permit and legal status in the country I live in, but only few banks open accounts to people like me, most just deny anyone but citizens of the country.
The ones that open all work in GrapheneOS though, so not big deal for me in my particular case.
It automatically moves all of your Direct Debits, recurring payments, balance etc. It even redirects incoming payments to your old account to your new one.
Having the debits move to the new IBAN automatically had to be mandated and built. It doesn't just happen. In markets with large incumbent banks they have no incentive whatsoever to make switching easy.
Having to change IBAN is a hassle, and shouldn't have been necessary. In fact, I think some countries (Germany?) actually got that right, and allow you to take your IBAN with you when switching banks. Like keeping your phone number when switching telco.
> None. Explicitly banned. ... I can't blame them. If some idiot roots their phone and downloads malware, the bank may be responsible for refunding them. I can see why they don't want that headache.
I mean this is the whole reason GrapheneOS does not ship a rooted version that they attest to. I doubt they are explicitly banning GrapheneOS, what they are doing is only trusting Google attestation.
The reason some banks explicitly allow GrapheneOS is because its easy for them to also trust GrapheneOS attestation, because it is not a rooted OS, and sensible security teams in banks can see that its more secure than any other Android phone including Pixels.
I wish people would understand this better, its what gives GrapheneOS a fighting chance of becoming a legitimate open source mobile OS that is accepted as secure for consumer use and that is not controlled by Apple or Google.
That's not the whole reason, or even the main reason GrapheneOS doesn't support or encourage root access.
The central design theme of GrapheneOS is to have stronger sandboxes and more limits on what apps can access than stock Android does. Granting an app root access does exactly the opposite; someone behaving rationally and consistently usually won't want to do both on the same device.
> though I feel bad for saying it, I can't blame them. If some idiot roots their phone and downloads malware, the bank may be responsible for refunding them. I can see why they don't want that headache.
Most of us understand the desire to protect customers from fraud, but I don't think we should accept blanket restrictions on everyone's freedom simply because some people might make poor security decisions.
There's also the unspoken/uncomfortable economic reality here: the optimal level of fraud isn't zero. At some point, the cost of preventing additional fraud, including the loss of individual choice and autonomy, exceeds the benefit.
Could we aim for proportionate, evidence-based security rather than treating the least capable user as the benchmark for everyone?
The scope is much smaller than that: restriction on what banking conveniences are provided.
> Most of us understand the desire to protect customers from fraud
> At some point, the cost of preventing additional fraud, including the loss of individual choice and autonomy, exceeds the benefit
> Could we aim for proportionate
I think you have answered your own question here; if a less than single percentage of retail customers use something that's not a general iOS or Android device, anything beyond that is not really worth it until regulation says otherwise.
> The scope is much smaller than that: restriction on what banking conveniences are provided.
The freedom to install whatever OS you like on your own phone?
> if a less than single percentage of __________ anything beyond that is not really worth it
My goodness one could fill in that blank in so many different ways, and all of the ones I can immediately think of would drag this thread straight into any number of dire arguments, so I'd better not.
Could be general polarisation, or just that it's a "but in my case it is different" visceral response.
While people might not be moved by data, it would be interesting if some more public information on what people actually use was available. Imagine data points like unpatched/unpatchable iOS or Android devices being multiple percentages, or outdated browsers. Similarly, the effort per app/OS combination; if it costs X to support Y configuration, then it would be somewhat easier to see if it's more about the will to do anything rather than real-world problems.
> banking apps began specifically permitting GrapheneOS
In my view, that's not any better than specifically permitting Google only. This should not be a whitelist at all. I assume my self-signed GrapheneOS would fail this test?
True. Those who only care about meeting regulatory requirements are not going to care if the regulatory requirements cease to exist. Those who care about security may be dismissive of regulatory requirements, but they will do so primarily when they are insufficient or when they conflict with their opinion. In the former case, they probably have the ability to go beyond the regulatory requirements. In the latter case: while I won't claim that regulations are perfect, I would trust them over the an anonymous person who may be going on anything from their personal opinion to legitimate research.
Currently, besides if you use cryptocurrencies, I don't think you can rely solely on "written regulations and systems of checks", somewhere along those processes there are a bunch of humans with their altruism (or lack of), taste and daily life moving those processes along. And judging by the state of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, this is probably a good thing more than a bad thing.
Lmao, it's never legislation and/or enforcement. It's the checkboxes that their insurances told them they had to check or they wouldn't be covered. Half of the problem goes back to insurances being thieves who would do anything to not pay up, the other half goes to upper management not giving a shit about people.
Yep. I used to work for an FQHC, and the only thing that improved our network security was the insurance premiums we'd incur without proving compliance. Ofc course, HIPAA is a thing, but that was simply the baseline.
This post is awful, the link posted here is to a social media reply and even that reply does not contain a list of the 12 banks, it does however contain a link to a much larger list of banks, which are supported but not necessarily officially supported.
Why not just use a web app from laptop at home? Why do you even need an app on your phone? So that you can urgently transfer money to some scammers you met in the street?
I do not have any banking apps, and I log into a bank account maybe once in month or less often.
Agreed that a website should be fine, but (Dutch) banks require the app as a second factor to log into the website. Fido2 hardware tokens could replace the bullshit requirement of "choose Apple or Google to be your overlord in order to use our service".
Unfortunately the only way I can spend directly from my work-sponsored FSA account is if I download their app. I haven't, since I can still just submit receipts, but they won't send you a physical card.
In Russia, all banks I tried, are usable via web app (because smartphone apps live only 1-2 months before they are detected and removed from app stores). The disadvantage of a web app is that it is not always-on, doesn't allow tracking users are well as a real app, and cannot display advertisement notifications.
I wonder how many of these supported apps are supported, because there are some geeks on the inside of the banks who want to have their favorite mobile OS supported.
In Germany Sparda-Banken and, I think, Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken support tap-to-pay through their apps. (And maybe other banks providing apps developed by the same contractor, Atruvia AG.)
PayPal also offers tap-to-pay, though I recently had to disable Graphene's "secure app spawning" feature for the PayPal app to get it to open.
Mine (KH bank) does perform a safetynet attestation that fails, as I don't even pass basicintegrity, then proceeds to completely ignore the result and still let me in on GOS.
(FWIW, sometimes when you _block_ the app from the Play Integrity API (in this pop-up) the app that wants to perform the check works, while it fails when you do not block it)
I always have to roll my eyes when someone tells me they consult for banks like that's supposed to be impressive.
That crowd thinks 12 Factor applications are some monumental thing, "oh no, we can't do that, we would have to hire only the most expert experts, nobody does 12 Factor applications". They're all Windows tards.
Then as highlighted the other day, the big banks, including LLoyds, all run on Google's Cloud because ding ding ding big surprise they couldn't figure it out themselves, and they didn't deploy multi-AZ. They didn't do a rudimentary thing that virtually every startup knows to do and does.
The banks and the clowns that surround them are, by today's standards, barely computer literate.
This post is actually really bad for a Hn post, it appears to be a reply to someone else hence the lack of context here, and the link appears to be a list of banking apps that are have some level of compatibility at all, not the official 12.
Very good news. It's a good sign if banking companies are considering the actual security issues at play and not just blindly rejecting all unofficial ROMs.
It's not Pixel only for no reason, there aren't any other phones which meet the rather sensible requirements at this moment. And even the latest Pixel phones have regressed.
Good. I am tired of vendor-lock-in of a few corporations
dominating the world here. Capitalism was never
corporate-fascism - after all one element is free competition
in a free market. This has been broken numerous times again
and again, and the US justice department is deliberately
unwilling to remedy this situation - thus also betraying
the idea behind capitalism. No wonder since the orange
mafia is running the show right now, with all signs of
real dementia now being obvious.
Capitalism was never the same as free-market. In a free market there's competition, but in capital-ism it's all centralised at a few people, the ones who have all the capital.
After that guy was arrested for wiping his GrapheneOS phone with a duress password, some reports appeared of previously usable apps becoming unusable specifically on GrapheneOS. This now reads like a possible reversal of that trend.
Where is this list of 12+ banks that explicitly allow graphene. My understanding is if the banks do not explicitly state support also in terms of ToS, they might pull the rug any moment. With neo banks you are then basically left without a bank.
I found some evidence of half a dozen that there might be support 'by desogn' (all of them might pull the rug at any time again as far as I understand TOS, which however seems true for any android in theory): Swissquote, Yuh, UBS, Starling Bank, Triodos Bankieren NL, AmeriCU Credit Union. More?
I use GrapheneOS, but if you as a bank want to gate access to my money via some kind of technology, you better be including it as part of the account.
For example, HSBC continues to let me manage my bank account via the web browser, and continues to offer a battery powered hardware token as the means of authentication.
I let you hold my money, for whatever reason. Why do you expect me to be your distributed infrastructure provider? I am not going to let you require that I run your proprietary malware in order to access my own money.
The idea where you are effectively _expected_ to constantly provide free compute for companies to run their complete garbage on hardware _you own_ just for the privilege of giving them money is one of the most absurd trend in recent times.
I'd say that JS webapps are the same but at least there you run things on your terms in a sandbox that you can inspect and look at the requests, and there's no effective enclave carved out of your hardware (except for EME but that's another topic for another day and I'd be complaining if banks started to use it too).
As for the second part (separate authentication methods), sure, would be rather problematic if they require you to have a phone, but that's a completely separate and different issue.
Do you not run apps at all?
This is likely meant as hyperbole, but South Korea's online banking requirements really tries to live up to this reputation
https://www.wellsfargo.com/biz/online-banking/securid/
it's so obvious they need backdoor access it's not even funny.
...You realize that we're talking about banks, right? Institutions operating on a fractional reserve? Take your money, use it as collateral to print 10x their holdings in interest-bearing debt? Free to restrict your withdrawals and bail-in funds from your account to save their own hides? Those banks.
The Occupy Wall Street and Bitcoin dudes and dudettes had it right, which is why they were carefully marginalized and appropriated, respectively.
None. Explicitly banned. And, though I feel bad for saying it, I can't blame them. If some idiot roots their phone and downloads malware, the bank may be responsible for refunding them. I can see why they don't want that headache.
Some. App works, but some functionality is unavailable. I've got a credit card app which works, but refuses to set up virtual cards or use "remember me". That's good enough for my use. Similarly, I had a merchant account which let me see my balance, but I couldn't use my phone as a credit card reader.
Works, but only in main profile. I'd rather keep financial things in a locked profile. But lots of banks disallow that.
Full. Everything works (although you may need to toggle some exploit protection off).
Some banks are reasonably good at letting you pass on technical queries to their developers - mostly the smaller ones. The nice thing about the UK banking sector is that it is trivial to move banks. So I switched accounts to providers which worked with my phone and let the old ones know why I was moving.
I've done a couple casual web searches for such evidence and come up short. If somebody has good data on this, I don't think they're publishing it.
Though the most effective way to cut out that kind of fraud is to stop using SMS for authentication, which banks don't seem to be interested in doing.
Few orgs understand compliance. While there might be some compliance people at the org level, individual teams implementing features will need to have a good line to them. In the end, knowledge is siloed and everyone needs to deliver on time. So it’s easier to forbid with some controlled collateral damage than to permit with an uncontrolled downside variance. Just a derisking hedge.
Serving use cases that drift away a bit “too far away” from the average (+ some sigmas) use case is not economically justified for a product manager - their KPIs would deteriorate from such “altruism”. No one will care if a few low-margin customers can’t use the product.
If the banks were really so concerned about malware on the user's endpoint, and they had competent CTO, then they would write an app for Trezor or offer a Trezor with their own logo and app on it and users could sign transactions with it.
Trezors show on a screen to the user "this is the amount and where to be sent that you are signing for".
Malware with high privileges on a compromised user endpoint can bamboozle the user but a hardware wallet would catch that.
And there is a very large swath of banking customers who I wouldn't be surprised to learn that banks will earn less than $130 from over the course of a decade.
This obviously depends on jurisdiction, but how commonly is this actually the case?
I’ve thankfully never personally been on the receiving end of fraud or identity theft, but my impression is that here, everything that happens up until the point you tell your bank ”hey, uh, I think my account’s been compromised” is pretty much on you. I don’t think rooting your phone, installing a banking app from some umauthorized source et.c would be hard to construe as negligence.
Unless the bank has reason to believe that you're either trying to defraud the bank, or where unduly careless with your banking credentials (and you have to be really careless to meet that bar in the eyes of the regulator and the courts), then they're expected to refund you.
I've seen banks refund £100ks to customers that were defrauded over many months via romance scams. There are cases ruling by the Financial Ombudsman forcing banks to refund customers to handed over their cards and PINs to carers that then stole money.
The general attitude of the law in the UK, the regulators, and the courts, is basically it's the banks responsibility to provide appropriate security, in a form that their customers can easily use and understand. If banks want to make it easy for customers to move and spend money, then the risks associated with that convenience accrue with the bank, not their customers.
Obviously banks work very hard to worm their way out of their responsibilities here. But if you use the consumer protection tools that exist in the UK, which are very easy to access, and which your bank is required to inform you of, then it's surprisingly easy to force a bank to refund you for any fraud you suffer.
A lot of people aren't able to distinguish "I got scammed" from "the bank took my money away".
I keep reading this justification, and it doesn't make an ounce of sense to me.
first of all, the number of people who want to root their phones is a fraction of 1%. children, teenage girls, and senile boomers don't do that. the number of people with rooted phones who could fall for "hello sir, I am sir John Whiteman from Microsoft, you're phone have virus, sir, please do the needful install this a pee kaa, sir" is near zero.
second of all, phones get stolen all the time, and it would make sense to reduce liability by not providing apps at all.
it's security theater.
If someone lies to them and tells them there is an app that lets them get free Roblox bucks or whatever, but first they have to root their phone, they will. If someone lies or makes an app that removes pimples or adds makeup in realtime, or something, but they make it only work on rooted phones, they will.
And it’s a completely different demographic than those would would fall for the phone call scam, but it’s incredibly disingenuous of you to suggest that the only malware distribution vector is being tricked into installing an APK.
I know people who are interested in modding games, pirating software, and installing “cool” apps just for the novelty. I would argue the most likely reason those people installed malware is voluntarily, because they searched out a hacked version of Bloons Tower Defence. Not because they “needed to pay an outstanding Windows service bill”.
I haven’t looked for a one-app-to-rule-them-all, but in principle it’s possible.
I think the UK banking sector is in rude health. It’s very competitive and it’s easy to move. The quality of the apps is very much part of any competitive advantage.
I have accounts with four uk banks and it’s trivial to manage them. It’s an example of legislation working really well.
Would anyone know why? My understanding of profiles is arguably very limited, but I always saw those as equivalent to device owner profile from app runtime standpoint.
Are there countries where this is a hassle? Now I've only had personal banking accounts in ~3 countries (so far?), so maybe I'm in a bubble, but in none of the countries has "switching banks" been more than basically create a new account, start using new IBAN for incoming transfers, move direct debits to use new IBAN and start using new card(s). Those last two were even automatic in the last move I did for a lot of stuff. Is it typically more difficult than that in other countries?
I have a living permit and legal status in the country I live in, but only few banks open accounts to people like me, most just deny anyone but citizens of the country.
The ones that open all work in GrapheneOS though, so not big deal for me in my particular case.
It automatically moves all of your Direct Debits, recurring payments, balance etc. It even redirects incoming payments to your old account to your new one.
It other countries it is a lot less trivial.
I mean this is the whole reason GrapheneOS does not ship a rooted version that they attest to. I doubt they are explicitly banning GrapheneOS, what they are doing is only trusting Google attestation.
The reason some banks explicitly allow GrapheneOS is because its easy for them to also trust GrapheneOS attestation, because it is not a rooted OS, and sensible security teams in banks can see that its more secure than any other Android phone including Pixels.
I wish people would understand this better, its what gives GrapheneOS a fighting chance of becoming a legitimate open source mobile OS that is accepted as secure for consumer use and that is not controlled by Apple or Google.
The central design theme of GrapheneOS is to have stronger sandboxes and more limits on what apps can access than stock Android does. Granting an app root access does exactly the opposite; someone behaving rationally and consistently usually won't want to do both on the same device.
Most of us understand the desire to protect customers from fraud, but I don't think we should accept blanket restrictions on everyone's freedom simply because some people might make poor security decisions.
There's also the unspoken/uncomfortable economic reality here: the optimal level of fraud isn't zero. At some point, the cost of preventing additional fraud, including the loss of individual choice and autonomy, exceeds the benefit.
Could we aim for proportionate, evidence-based security rather than treating the least capable user as the benchmark for everyone?
The scope is much smaller than that: restriction on what banking conveniences are provided.
> Most of us understand the desire to protect customers from fraud > At some point, the cost of preventing additional fraud, including the loss of individual choice and autonomy, exceeds the benefit > Could we aim for proportionate
I think you have answered your own question here; if a less than single percentage of retail customers use something that's not a general iOS or Android device, anything beyond that is not really worth it until regulation says otherwise.
> The scope is much smaller than that: restriction on what banking conveniences are provided.
The freedom to install whatever OS you like on your own phone?
> if a less than single percentage of __________ anything beyond that is not really worth it
My goodness one could fill in that blank in so many different ways, and all of the ones I can immediately think of would drag this thread straight into any number of dire arguments, so I'd better not.
I'm surprised to see that in this thread. That's usually reserved for politics and arguments about AI.
While people might not be moved by data, it would be interesting if some more public information on what people actually use was available. Imagine data points like unpatched/unpatchable iOS or Android devices being multiple percentages, or outdated browsers. Similarly, the effort per app/OS combination; if it costs X to support Y configuration, then it would be somewhat easier to see if it's more about the will to do anything rather than real-world problems.
In my view, that's not any better than specifically permitting Google only. This should not be a whitelist at all. I assume my self-signed GrapheneOS would fail this test?
Ironic for apps that are often so paranoid about "security" and "hardware attestation"
But both are examples of cybernetic entities, if they don't care then their control loops aren't correctly aligned.
I do not have any banking apps, and I log into a bank account maybe once in month or less often.
Word is that banking apps that implement their own nfc interface within their app can be used for “tap to pay” on Graphene.
Curious as to how we can know which providers support this.
PayPal also offers tap-to-pay, though I recently had to disable Graphene's "secure app spawning" feature for the PayPal app to get it to open.
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
Looks like good progress to me.
I wonder if it's intentional.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gr.nikolasspyr...
(FWIW, sometimes when you _block_ the app from the Play Integrity API (in this pop-up) the app that wants to perform the check works, while it fails when you do not block it)
That crowd thinks 12 Factor applications are some monumental thing, "oh no, we can't do that, we would have to hire only the most expert experts, nobody does 12 Factor applications". They're all Windows tards.
Then as highlighted the other day, the big banks, including LLoyds, all run on Google's Cloud because ding ding ding big surprise they couldn't figure it out themselves, and they didn't deploy multi-AZ. They didn't do a rudimentary thing that virtually every startup knows to do and does.
The banks and the clowns that surround them are, by today's standards, barely computer literate.
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
I'm just starting a deep-dive on it.
As a newbie, can existing users point out any other gotchas?
* EDIT: Oh ffs, only on Pixel phones ...
I'm a previous Moto user and despite Pixel supposedly being more advanced, I really disliked them. I always preferred the Moto phones.
Gives me hope!