I did not know that. That is very interesting.
On that topic, an honest question: what is the killer feature of banking apps that everyone is so hot on? Are we talking like retail banking or money transmitters? I am not using any bespoke banking apps, and I don't feel like I'm missing out, but maybe I just don't know what I'm missing.
What does detract from my GrapheneOS experience is the keyboard. It's just ok. I need swipe typing though, and I haven't found anything even close to gboard glide.
* A wallet for QR-code based payments backed by a national standard for their content and by the money in your bank account;
* A software implementation of an NFC-enabled credit or debit card, or sometimes with a magnetic strip emulation in addition to that;
* An interface to transfer money to other bank accounts in the same country or abroad, or to convert between local and foreign currency if you have a foreign currency bank account;
* A way to pay common utility bills - in some cases, by scanning the QR code on the bill;
* A way to manage banking and investment accounts - e.g., if you want an extra savings account in Japanese yen with a new debit card attached to it, tap a few times and it's there;
* A chat with bank representatives - for example, to provide supporting documents by photographing them, without ever visiting the bank;
* A second factor (as in 2FA) to approve money transfers initiated from the desktop web browser, meeting the bank standards where TOTP can't meet them (e.g., due to the legal requirement to say what transaction the code is for).
The real problem is that many banks are deprecating their browser-based interfaces and are turning app-only.
What bank does that? If my bank did that, I would find a new bank immediately. That is not OK.
First, how about Philippine National Bank? Compare snapshots of their front page, https://www.pnb.com.ph/, on web.archive.org, and see that they have completely removed the link to their Internet Banking system. Only Mobile Banking remains.
See also https://web.archive.org/web/20220605084957/https://portal.pn...
Also, Metrobank threatens to make it impossible to log into their online banking website without the mobile app installed. This is already officially the case for their corporate banking, but it's just TOTP with a non-extractable (on a non-rooted phone) seed and some anti-root checks under the hood.
Finally, the following mobile wallets and "digital banks" are app-only: GCash, Maya, GoTyme Bank. The first two are the only ways to pay for water here, other than going to a kiosk where someone else would use their GCash account to process your payment.
For me, the killer "feature" is that I need to generate an auth code on my bank's app to be able to log in to my account and make transfers via my browser (or I can use the app directly). In other words, it's considerably more difficult to actually do (retail) banking without my bank's app.
https://f-droid.org/packages/helium314.keyboard/
HeliBoard is currently asking people to volunteer swipe data so they can further improve on free and open alternative for swipe keyboard. Please consider helping out!
https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard/wiki/Tutorial:-How-to...
Apple seems to basically do privacy-related things to an 80% level but not bothering with getting it totally correct. This makes business sense because the extra 20% is way more difficult, but it's great to see GrapheneOS going all the way.
So an application of course can use other android services if it declared that, that's why it can see whether it's running or not. But you are in full control whether google play services is installed, and what it can use.
Of course this may break certain apps (Google maps location sharing will probably not work with the location permission denied for play services), which may or may not degrade gracefully.
GrapheneOS has Contact Scopes and Storage Scopes for pretending all of the contacts, media and storage permissions are granted with the app unable to access any additional user data without the user explicitly adding it on a case-by-case basis. Unlike the recent iOS feature, apps can't see the Contacts permission group isn't granted and it supports giving less data than the whole contact too. It also supports labels for groups of contacts shared between apps.
Mock Location is a standard Android feature. We're working on a per-app Location Scopes replacement. We're also working on Camera Scopes and Microphone Scopes. We plan to continue down that road covering less major permissions too.
Sandboxed Google Play already works near perfectly with close to 100% app compatibility. It's only apps disallowing using a non-stock OS via the Play Integrity API or to a lesser extent certain other methods which aren't compatible. McDonalds is a major example. X forbids password login but you can use Vanadium to login with a passkey and then use that in the app. ~10% of banking apps do it but not most. We've convinced multiple banks to permit GrapheneOS, and that's going to become MUCH easier now.