151–160 of 182 posts
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Why not based on android, out of interest? Basing on android gives you lots of driver support which would be very hard to recreate, and lots of open source apps immediately available.
Large parts of Android (Google Play Services) are not open source.
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I used Graphene OS on a Pixel 4 for a few years and loved it. I feel like I'm a total minority user who doesn't attach themselves to specific apps so not having Firefox available wasn't really a huge thing for me. There were several apps I did have to have, but they were all available through the F-Droid store. Graphene was easy for me but like you pointed out, many will not use it because it doesn't have exactly wha…
Windows Phone 8.0 was great, partially because of the OS, and partially because MS paid for ports of the top-N apps to it. GrapheneOS didn’t work as a daily driver for me because I couldn’t reliably use it for uber, lyft, parking or ev charging. The camera support was missing some features. Most of that is fixable by adding back the google services, but then you lose most of the privacy advantages of having a de-goog…
- Google Play is sandboxed [1], you have (important) privacy advantages
- with a second account for banking apps (or in your example) uber, lyft, one can nicely separate "google-play-apps" from free apps, account switching is fast
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Yeah, public grants in the EU never work very well. However, some of the consortia members have already delivered good software. Personally, I think someone should have bought Jolla and open-sourced Sailfish and their Android VM. Perhaps turn it into a foundation, like Signal.
>consortia Wait, there is more than one?
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I’ve never been able to discover decent apps on the Google Play Store. I’m continually surprised how bad its search functionality is. Usually, I start with f-droid (to avoid spy/adware), then go straight to ddg or kagi.
Just to add, F-Droid is not a guarantee against adware. There are definitely adware apps (and by extension, maybe even spyware) on F-Droid.
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I'm not using Google play or any other services on android over 6 years now. You don't need banking apps for making transactions.
I live in an EU country and I, in fact, cannot use online banking without a Google-enabled Android or an iPhone. There is exactly one bank that offers a desktop authenticator, but we had a really bad experience with them when we tried them for a year.
for anything EU or eu commission, you must either have an app in stock OS smartphone, or receive a sms on a network they can validate sim is attached to a tax id, or nothing else is allowed. totp et al is legally verboten.
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I have accounts at 1 Swiss bank, 2 German banks, and 2 UK banks. None of them require an app for any functionality. You can get a little hardware thing to generate their OTP codes, as an alternative to apps.
The hardware dongle sounds like it might be TOTP. There are plenty of clients for that for laptops and phones, assuming you can enroll your own secret.
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I live in an EU country and I, in fact, cannot use online banking without a Google-enabled Android or an iPhone. There is exactly one bank that offers a desktop authenticator, but we had a really bad experience with them when we tried them for a year.
I live in a EU country as well, Netherlands to be exact. Never had an issue with any bank. What are you talking about?
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I think policies[1] are blocking F-Droid more than anything from being a viable alternative. A bank will likely never release their app as open source, nor will any of the big authentication vendors. This means that you cannot completely replace the Google Play Store with F-Droid if you have to use any of these, you can only use it as an additional store, at which point many won't be bothered. [1]: https://f-droid.or…
> A bank will likely never release their app as open source, nor will any of the big authentication vendors. I suppose you're right and I think it's worrying that precisely these kinds of organizations still seem to rely on security through obscurity (to some extent, not solely).
I miss the time of totp dongles.
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It's called Fennec because it is not from Mozilla and includes patches to removs propietary bits (which are not allowed on F-Droid). https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild And fennec was the 'internal' name for firefox on android from mozilla.
> because it is not from Mozilla and includes patches to remove propietary bits More specifically, because Mozilla won’t allow you to do that and still call it Firefox. (Except if you’re Debian, apparently Debian now gets an unwritten free pass after they demonstrated their willingness to protest that with Iceweasel. And either F-Droid is not big enough for that, Mozilla is not the same as it was back then, or both.)
so, if firefox build builds as fenec by default, fennec it is.
F-Droid still has some big tasks in order to be useable for the general public, when comparing it with e.g. Google Play Store. For example, if you search it for "browser", Firefox will not show up because A) It's called Fennec B) The F-Droid search seems to be exact infix search, and Fennec's title is "Fennec F-Droid -- Browse the web", in which "Browser" does not appear, only "browse". So it doesn't find it. In gene…
The search for "browser" should have returned Mull, which is a privacy oriented deblobbed fork of Fennec.