These are self-inflicted problems by these apps. Nothing to do with the OS. These apps simply don't work. Complain to the companies that push these broken apps to you.
Would you buy a microwave oven that kills itself if you play the wrong kind of music in your kitchen?
So these problems become problems of the OS, not because the OS has a problem, but because it affects the reality of using the OS.
Send a letter like that certified. It gets attention, and the time to write and mail a check really isn't, if you batch your bills, more than using an app.
We do have ways to push their inconvenience back on them.
It's a big and hairy world out there. Having lived on three continents and traveled to some pretty wild places, I always get a kick out of seeing which rights people have and assume that the rest of the world also has.
We’ve gotten to the point where unfortunately it is a luxury to fight for your privacy and consumer rights.
Not saying that we should just give up. But as the above poster said, it's a luxury that takes a lot of time and resources.
Do they? News is usually the first thing that is replaced by propaganda.
But yes, everyone chooses the battles they wish to fight. None are easy.
To be clear I want the same thing you do. But just going “do it it’s important” is not going to make it happen.
They do, they just don't want to. Typing a short letter and mailing it is very little effort. Less so with AI these days.
These aren’t oversights, these are deliberate practices.
That's a weird one though, if you have alternatives you could always switch.
Nah, not really. Using a VPN is a luxury, a preference. You're arguing that using a VPN should be a right in a discussion about people not being forced to use specific Apple or Google services, which is an entirely different thing.
A Professional letter letting them know that you know your rights, and that they know your rights (Them getting your letter is your proof of that) is what the beginning of someone losing his bonus for a compliance incident looks like.
Companies don't care about you, or even shareholders, they care about the incentives of leadership.
For things where we do have a choice, yes I agree.
My utility company, for instance, literally won’t let you navigate their site with a VPN running. These kinds of practices are commonplace and becoming standard.
But I'm OK because one of my banking apps has some method of reading my contract number from the disabled electricity company app, and telling me how much I should pay and then it fires off a payment to them. Even though I can no longer use the electricity app directly because I enabled USB debugging once, the banking app is somehow still able to pick up this info from it.
Of course, said banking app refuses to run on Graphene or any of these other Google Play-less OSes, and the bank doesn't respond to inquiries about that issue, multiple people have tried.
The other bank I use does respond, and says they'll never run on "alternative OSes" because "alternative OSes are too insecure." They don't respond to followups.
I'm just saying man. A lot of people think this stuff is trivially solved because there is an option available to them in their home country. You don't know how big and nuts this world of 8 billion people and 200 countries is. This stuff varies beyond imagination, sometimes for the much worse.
A lot of people don't think this way because they haven't had any problems. But then one day it happens to you and you realize, ok, this is the one thing that matters - you're in a cashless store and the only way you can pay for your meal is to use Approved Apple or Approved Google operating systems.
Where I live, the app my electricity utility provides for viewing and paying my account DISABLES ITSELF FOREVER if you so much as enable USB debugging on your phone (even after you've disabled it again).
To their credit Graphene maintains a global database of which of these apps work and don't. They're the only ones I know of so a thousand upvotes to Graphene OS.
But for my banks, the records in that database are grim. They won't run on Graphene, and they don't respond to reports about it.
One of my banks just discontinued its web UI because "people don't use it anymore, they use the app only."
This is how they're going to get us, folks. This is how we're going to lose it all. Writing code alone will not solve this. It will require some kind of collective action to defend our liberties. Some parts of the world are already lost. So this situation will likely come to a jurisdiction near you eventually: to make a transaction you will need permission from Google, Apple, Visa, Mastercard, or it won't happen. Then that four company list will start to shrink.