Your phone is about to stop being yours

There are essentially two separate issues here.

The first is the anti-trust angle. Some subset of bank apps don't work because of attestation and that's a significant barrier to adoption for switching to competitors, so it ought to be an anti-trust violation for the platform to do that.

The second is, you try it and discover that your bank doesn't work. If you want it bad enough you can switch banks, and the fact that it doesn't work is a signal that your bank has a weak security team who is just cargo culting deleterious vendor nonsense without evaluating whether it has any real security value.

(The use case for attestation is completely orthogonal to bank apps because it can't prevent credential stealing from compromised phones running a fake app since the fake app won't require attestation, and it can't prevent attackers from using stolen credentials to transfer funds because once they have the credentials they can just use a normal phone, and that's the case even if the attestation was completely airtight, which it isn't. Meanwhile the devices that can pass attestation are generally more vulnerable because it implies they're running the more-likely-to-be-outdated OS that came with the device rather than a third party upgrade with more recent patches, so they're essentially encouraging their customers to not upgrade their OS. Banks that do this are wearing clown makeup and you have to ask if you trust them with your money.)

Now you just have to deal with Apple's hostile repairability situation. Cryptographically-mated parts are just the beginning.

GrapheneOS proves it's not an absolute, that "the computer I carry around in my pocket" must depend upon a megacorp / gov. The issue still is boiling down to GrapheneOS having less $$ for marketing vs GOOG / Alphabet / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

Yeah, I tried that out last year when this whole debacle was announced for the first time.

I'm not going back to paying without my phone. So yeah, I'm not going to a free platform either.

the choice really is mostly down to Google's Android or iOS - unless you're ready to make sacrifices. If you are... More power to you! I'm not (at this point in my life) right now.

You know, I'm fine with this (just as long as the opt-in is one-time, not for every install). A device maker needs to balance the interests of many different groups, including nontechnical users subject to scams, and it's pretty self-centered to get self-righteously outraged when things get a little harder for power users, when those changes may save the butt of a lot of other people.

The only thing that gives me pause is this:

> Worse: this flow runs entirely through Google Play Services, not the Android OS. Google can change it, tighten it, or kill it at any time, with no OS update required and no consent needed. And as of today, it hasn't shipped in any beta, preview, or canary build. It exists only as a blog post and some mockups.