Does that include banking and credit card apps? Most of my bank and card accounts require their own phone app to authorise transactions from time to time, and several accounts require their phone app to authenticate login to online banking, even if I'm opening it in a regular desktop browser on another computer. Three of those accounts don't have any other way of being managed than online, so their phone app (or tablet app) is mandatory to do anything with the account.

I had to buy a replacement phone in a hurry last year when my old phone's screen stopped working, just so I could login to make an urgent bank transfer. I would have preferred to take my time over what to buy, but so many financial things I use are blocked without a smartphone now.

Yes, it does. Even my podunk little credit union's app works absolutely fine.

Yes, every banking and financial app I have tried runs just fine on GrapheneOS.

The digital ID app in Sweden (BankID) recently started requiring google play services.

99.999% of businesses don't publish APKs or upload them to F-Droid. Expecting people to use third party distribution mechanisms like Aurora store is entirely unreasonable.

As for "working around" it, it's ridiculous to impose that expectation on the general population. Sure, you and I will always be able to find a way to hack around restrictions, but it's inaccessible to the overwhelming majority of the population.

What is unreasonable about showing people there's another interface to access all the apps in the Google Play Store, where you can download and use all of them without signing into a Google account?

Because Google could flip a switch and stop that at any moment. There is a systemic problem with how society is becoming more and more reliant upon a few large tech firms. Work arounds will work whilst they're small enough and fly under the radar, but if they get larger they'll be stopped by the holders of the binaries.

We're increasingly like animals that become dependent on a single source of food or a single watering hole. It's really risky. You could hardly design more fragile systems (or business models) that depend in these very narrow bottlenecks.

So we should...submit to the binary already, in case the binary closes the loophole? How is that a solution?

Such a HN comment lmao

Aurora store does not work anymore without a google account, at least for now. Google blocked their proxy accounts, I think. So curently there is no secure way to install apps from the play store without an account.

This isn't true either. I'm still actively using Aurora Store without signing into a Google account.

See https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/AuroraStore/-/issues/912#note_1... and https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/AuroraStore/-/issues/917. But right, this seems to have moved from "not working at all" to "being flaky", though it absolutely did not work for me.

Does Foobar national park publish their app to F-droid?

The exception does not disprove the rule.

Most people use phones they bought at their local electronics store, with default Android OS and default settings.

You can use android without logging into a google account with the default ROM and settings, just don't log in. I'm surprised more people don't do this, the app store is the only thing you "need" a google account for, and before they banned Aurora it was trivial to use it too.

The claim was "You can't."

The exception establishes that you can.

The exception very specifically and precisely does disprove the rule.

If you use aurora store you use google accounts. Someone else made them for you, but you're still using them.

Does it work for Lyft / Uber?

I can use Lyft with no issue. I prefer it to Uber, so haven't tries Uber.