Paying without Google: New consortium wants to remove custom ROM hurdles
www.heise.de
Using banking and payment apps on Android smartphones with custom ROMs is a problem: A European industry consortium now wants to change that.

Pay securely with an Android smartphone, completely without Google services: This is the plan being developed by the newly founded industry consortium led by the German Volla Systeme GmbH. It is an open-source alternative to Google Play Integrity. This proprietary interface decides on Android smartphones with Google Play services whether banking, government, or wallet apps are allowed to run on a smartphone.

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
    2·
    3 hours ago

    i’m just guessing here but i think that the critical requirements to be able to run banking apps securely on your smartphone are:

    • lockable/unlockable bootloader
    • quality control of the operating system to make sure it doesn’t contain malware/spyware
    • internet connection & open-protocol banking network

    the first two parts are general smartphone/laptop security and operating system integrity, which can only be done through hardware/general software developers. Like i think we need reliable hardware manufacturers but also institutions that check that open source software doesn’t contain malware. Like when you run apt install some-package who says that some-package doesn’t contain malware?

    The third one is the only part that is actually specific to banking. That’s a whole separate topic and has barely anything to do with the first two steps.

    • grue@lemmy.world
      1·
      15 minutes ago

      Like when you run apt install some-package who says that some-package doesn’t contain malware?

      The Debian (or Ubuntu) package maintainer says that. Having an application package available in a distro’s official repository is an endorsement of the safety of that package.

      This is something people need to appreciate before they go adding PPAs and flatpaks and whatnot willy-nilly.