If I’m charitable, I could assume they intended to make a controversial move to drive public attention to the growing government restrictions on innocuous apps. As far as I know, though, nobody at F-Droid admitted to this; and if they were, why didn’t they mark other widely used apps like Wikipedia and Reddit frontends that provide easy access to much more sexually explicit content in the same protest?
If I’m less charitable, and go by what F-Droid admins actually said, they took this action out of a sincere belief that these apps contained content unsafe for minors that necessitated flagging, and sincerely believed that Wikipedia and Reddit frontends somehow don’t qualify for the same. If they honestly believed this, it demonstrates (to me) poor judgment; and since the action was walked back almost immediately due to negative public response, that indicates further that they never actually believed this in the first place, and that instead somebody took it upon himself to specifically target religious apps out of his own bias.
Either way, it really soured me on the judgment of the F-Droid maintainers. After a stunt like that, I no longer trust them to fight the battle against oppressive government restrictions on operating systems effectively. Formerly an F-Droid user of many years, this caused me to switch away completely: I’ve started donating monthly to Accrescent instead, download as many apps as I can from there, and switched from F-Droid to Obtanium for any apps not yet on Accrescent.
Linus knew this day 1 and it bows to no one.
Ezekiel 23:20
Does the Bible encourage violence or promiscuity? Not really, no. Does it mention and describe those things in some detail? Yes, absolutely. If that's the kind of content you need to remove from your store, then obviously you need to remove the Bible from your store. Whether that was really the case seems questionable at best, but the stated logic seemed pretty coherent to me.
If you care about your actually owning your device, install something else than stock OS. I would recommend GrapheneOS, since the security of some/most other alternatives is pretty bad.
Hey I believe that too. If people are entitled to believe whatever is written in those books, surely people are also entitled to believe it's nonsense and actively harmful.
(As an aside, if they indeed had to follow some Dutch law and remove Bible and Quran apps, maybe F-Droid can be hosted by freedom.gov, US govt's new anticensorship portal..)
kernel is locked and most phones can't be rooted anymore
So, you have to wonder whether you want such a phone anyway if you care about security and privacy. If you don't care about security anyway, you could as well run /e/OS, etc.
Above-mentioned Samsung phones could perhaps make the cut, but don't support unlocking anymore (and when they still did, would blow a Knox eFuse).
> We're working with a major OEM and the devices will be the future versions of existing models they have now. The devices will be priced similarly to Pixels. The initial devices will have a flagship Snapdragon SoC for the best security and support time. Snapdragon flagships have significantly better CPU and GPU performance than Pixels. Snapdragon provides high quality Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GNSS and cellular support as part of the SoC. eSIM and other functionality is also provided by the SoC. Snapdragon has decent image processing functionality included too, and good neural network acceleration.
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1o32gpg/deleted...
If F-Droid were being overcautious, they would have blocked social media apps too. Social media is explicitly the single biggest target of these “think of the children” app store laws after outright porn sites. F-Droid left Reddit and Mastodon clients unmarked. Am I supposed to believe that F-Droid honestly thought the law applied to apps containing only ancient religious texts, and not to social media? Has any other app store interpreted the regulations the same way? And if they truly believed that was a legal requirement, why did they reverse the policy after only a couple days of user complaints?
Not really. And biblical times does not mean people's lives were run according to commandments in the Jewish bible (neither in ancient Judea nor elsewhere).
Horizontally splitting Google into multiple companies.
Not division via department splits, but equal partitioning across the company into multiple horizontal businesses that compete on the same offerings.
The EU and next DOJ/FTC need to force this.
Meanwhile Reddit is a doubly poor example because even though the service contains NSFW content, it marks it as such, and then the client not only doesn't itself contain it but gives the user a separate opportunity to select against it when using the app to download pages.
This seems like a bad reason for not supporting a device. If the device doesn't have a hardware feature then the OS it came with can't be doing it either, and then all you're doing is leaving the user with all of the other security problems in the OEM OS that otherwise could have been improved by replacing it.
I get all or nothing when your threat model is state actors. However, for most people, the benefit is just freedom from corporate agendas.
Not everyone needs kernel hardening, or always E2EE (as with signal). Personally I just like the features it provides (e.g. scoped storage, disabling any app including Google play services, profiles etc etc
Its also an easier sell to people who are apathetic to security when the product is just better and more secure, the same way apple does (for whatever their reasons may be).
All that said, I get they're limited in funds and manpower, plus the things mentioned at the end there, so I can only be so peeved they chose a target and stuck with it. They typically cite security as the reason, not those other ones, however.
Many banking apps do work on GrapheneOS, the list had already been linked to by others
Citation needed?
> This was common knowledge after the Snowden stuff.
Not to me, it isn't? As far as I'm aware, most of the Snowden stuff were centered around PRISM, which allowed widescale wiretapping of internet backbone, as well as agreements with big cloud providers to allow tapping into their data.
I haven't seen anything indicating that there was widespread compromise of personal computing devices at such a deep level of the root of trust. I haven't seen any indication that the NSA has a backdoor in the earlyboot CPU of any device, whether that is the Qualcomm boot processor, the Intel Management Engine or the AMD Platform Security Processor (which all have similar capabilities and hidden firmware).
If I missed anything/have links to research into these backdoors, I'd like to see them!
The EU is not going to force this, because it has enough fights to pick with the US, and this is not the hill that they are willing to die on. It would be far more likely for them to financially support an AOSP-based OS.
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
grapheneOS only works with google phones.
And clearly that wasn’t the standard anyway. Before the introduction of the policy restricting religious texts, the only apps F-Droid had marked NSFW were frontends to porn sites, even though the apps presumably contained no sexual content directly.
Also, what kind of banking are people doing that requires an app? I genuinely don't know what it could be.
There is common knowledge to suggest that it is not the case (or maybe is no longer the case):
>Mainstream smartphones do not provide DMA access from the baseband to the application processor's memory... Yes, getting baseband access then lets you monitor regular voice and SMS comms. But no, it does not instantly compromise the AP so using the Signal app would still be secure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906488
>Apple mitigates baseband processor vulnerabilities by putting it behind what's essentially an IOMMU. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29440154
>This is false FUD that keeps being repeated. It's not true. No iPhone ever has had a baseband with DMA access to my knowledge, and modern Qualcomm devices have advanced IOMMU systems to firewall away the baseband from the rest of system memory. I'm sure some phones somewhere existed where the baseband was privileged, but it's not the norm. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30393283
>Connecting a cellular radio via USB provides far less isolation than the approach of a tiny kernel driver connected to an IOMMU isolated cellular radio on mainstream devices. USB has immense complexity and attack surface, especially with a standard Linux kernel configuration. Forensic data extraction companies mostly haven't bothered using attack vectors other than USB due to it being such a weak point. Many of the things people claim about cellular radios in mainstream smartphones are largely not true and they're missing that other radios are implemented in a very comparable way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46841004
If application processors and hardware crypto accelerators are good enough to make this invisible to the end user, then why not? Why not have everyone be on hardened kernels by default and let them opt-in to insecure ones instead of the other way around?
And I don't really think that people mean using google hardware but rather being mined by google software.
May I ask, if you (a) just want to be technically correct, (b) don't see the difference or (c) are trying to make a point I don't understand and if so would be willing to explain?
---
[0] https://piunikaweb.com/2026/02/02/grapheneos-non-pixel-hardw...
Security is one of one of the main selling points of GrapheneOS, I can fully understand that they don't want to weaken that by supporting fundamentally insecure devices.
I think a nice side-effect is that they only focus on a small number of devices (Pixels) and support those really well. I have followed the /e/OS forums for a while and many devices have constant regressions because it is hard to validate each release on tens of devices.
I get all or nothing when your threat model is state actors.
People do have different thread models, though I think up-to-date software should be the baseline for everyone and where pretty much every phone outside iPhone, Google Pixel, and a subset of Samsung phones fail. Also, I think having a secure enclave should be the baseline, since phones do get stolen.
Its also an easier sell to people who are apathetic to security when the product is just better and more secure, the same way apple does
That's really a weird example though for supporting the argument that GrapheneOS should support more devices. Isn't Pixel + GrapheneOS then pretty much iPhone + iOS? Privacy-respecting, secure, not pushing AI subscriptions all the time (though iOS is getting worse in that respect), offering useful functionality?
At any rate, I understand if you have another phone, you wouldn't buy a Pixel for GrapheneOS, but it does make sense to buy your next phone for running GrapheneOS. Pixel covers a pretty wide price range to, e.g. the Pixel 9a was 349 Euro here recently, all the way up to the Pixel fold.
Google lost all three cases. The DOJ in all three recommended the company be broken up, but the judges disagreed. If you want to blame someone, then blame the judges, not the current admin or Bidens DOJ - both of whom said Google should be broken up.
Better yet, you can buy a used pixel phone.
That's also an unfair take when one considers how many improvements they've upstreamed to AOSP and how many quality of life features they've implemented.
https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
If the bank is very hard-nosed about it, you could consider keeping an old iPhone or Pixel (because long security updates) for banking if it is practical to do for you. 95% without big tech is also a big win. Of course, if you need to have it with you at all times, that might not be a worthwhile option.
2FA. I was a smartphone hold-out for longer than anyone I know, but banks mandating 2FA with no options for doing it in a standards-compliant way or any way that doesn't involve the app stores was what finally broke my resistance.
edit: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
Which would also explain the Bible apps without an initial copy. Choosing which translation to download when substantially all of them are translations of the same NSFW text means that substantially all of the users would end up with NSFW content on their device by using the app.
The problem for those of us in the USA, that labels anyone who disagrees with the current administration and ICE as a domestic terrorist, means that now everyone's threat model is a state actor.
The threat model of every citizen that dares to exercise their first amendment rights now escalated beyond corporate agendas to "How do I make sure Israeli & Palantir spyware doesn't end up on my phone? How do I make sure if my phone does get confiscated, Cellebrite can't image it or access the data?"
Even if that weren't the case, I see no valid reason to be lax with security in 2026. There's no excuse anymore, I mean we still have OEMs selling phones that they do not issue security updates for after purchase. That's just gross negligence.
(/s in case it is needed.)
As a smaller project, choosing a small set of hardware and supporting it really well (aside from security reasons) seems like a much better strategy than supporting tens of devices badly (go to e.g. the /e/OS forums to see what regressions people are dealing with after monthly updates).
Except that there is nothing fundamentally insecure about them, they just don't support a specific convenience feature. You can straightforwardly support PIN-based unlocking by encrypting the PIN in ordinary persistent storage using a longer passphrase that only has to be entered during boot.
This is arguably even more secure because it allows the PIN to be dumped from active memory and require the longer passphrase again after a timeout, a limited number of bad attempts or in response to a panic button on the lock screen. Then the device doesn't contain the long passphrase whatsoever, instead of having it permanently stored inside of an opaque enclave that itself could (and often does!) have its own vulnerabilities.
Especially since in many countries it requires a national e-ID that is an app on your phone.
org.thoughtcrime.securesms
I'll only use it for the specified purpose since I far prefer my own XMPP server with OMEMO encryption - which is based on the same 'double ratchet' keying as Signal uses.
Close to every bank in the EU requires their user to have an app, for MFA (both for logging in and for validating transactions - transfers, payments). They use the smartphone's TPM. I have yet to see one that allows you to use your own MFA app.
The few I've seen that don't require it will validate the same through text messages (not everyone has a smartphone); though if you associate their app even once, you're screwed - the app it is from now on.
Anyway, I am going to stop here, since this will probably derail in a non-productive political discussion otherwise.
Not a bad deal and pretty crazy how fast smartphones depreciate now.
Not only is this not going to convince anyone that there's anything behind it other than an attempt to formulate a winning argument (having set that as your goal) irrespective whether there's any actual sincerity to the words you're choosing, but it's going to come comes across to a healthy portion the world's population as the opposite of clever: that anyone who's convinced themselves that it really is clever and that no one can possibly permeate this forcefield of insincerity is a perhaps-delusional, and definitely-insufferable halfwit.
In this context one super-nice feature of GrapheneOS (do check the legal ramifications though, IANAL) is that it supports a duress PIN. It's an alternative PIN that immediately erases your phone (probably throws away your FDE keys?) and clears your eSIM.
Besides that, it also supports configurable time to reboot after no unlocks. This is relevant because it is typically much harder to exfiltrate data BFU (before first unlock) than after. iPhone also supports this, but only does it after I think 3 or 4 days. On GrapheneOS, this can be set as short as 10 minutes when there is a risk of your phone getting confiscated. Of course, you can also manually reboot, but that's not possible in every situation.
But for Apple that is not necessarily a bad thing. They're a company. Their goal is to make money and they are highly successful at it. GraphineOS is not a company. They don't make money. Which begs the question of what is GraphineOS's real goal and is it valuable? Creating a maximally secure mobile OS seems valuable on its face, but that value is undercut by its inaccessibility.
"Trusted Boot" is a meme on x86. If you really want something like that you need to do what Oxide Computer is doing and rip out UEFI for good and implement your own secure boot chain.
Qubes is great but at the end of the day cannot protect against evil maid attacks to the level that pixel or apple phones can. Its great at making sure a browser exploit cannot steal your banking credentials you have open in a different virtual machine but cannot overcome the limitations of the platforms it builds off of.
So I understand why the GrapheneOS folks do what they do.
See also: "X86 considered harmful" by the founder of Qubes OS (posted in 2015!)
https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf
Both lines of thinking are faulty, and attempting to directly extrapolate from one project to the other (in either direction) mostly only conveys a lack of understanding of both projects, even (especially?) one's favored project.
Joanna Rutkowska herself admitted that the difficult nature of trying to contain the PC hardware stack made it ultimately feel like she lost the war. Qubes OS is inherently vastly more vulnerable than GrapheneOS, in large part precisely because of their different approaches to hardware. Some of this has been mitigated by developments made since she stepped back from the project, but some of it will always remain. How to deal with this inherent conflict is not a simple matter and the two projects have taken two distinctly different approaches.
In the cases of both projects, I think they made justifiable decisions in their approaches. I use and contribute to both projects.
If you've been using Qubes OS long enough, you'll remember a time when trying to run it on anything that wasn't essentially identical to the ThinkPads used by Qubes OS devs often presented a major challenge.
GrapheneOS is a fundamentally different project in scope, and each project has a subset of users which seem unable to do anything but evaluate the other project based on the criteria set by the one they like.
"The goal of the project is not to slightly improve some aspects of insecure devices and supporting a broad set of devices would be directly counter to the values of the project. A lot of the low-level work also ends up being fairly tied to the hardware."
GrapheneOS achieves significantly more security on the hardware level than Qubes OS, in very large part specifically due to the nature of the project. It's also an infinitely simpler OS to get up and running with, on both current-gen flagship hardware and current-gen value-prop hardware available in just about any store which sells cell phones.
In addition to all that, by the nature of the respective code bases it presents a significantly smaller attack surface than a computer running Qubes OS.
Securing a single device type with excellent hardware security is simply much more viable a project than securing a broad range of devices with hardware security that is, at best, pretty terrible.
Repeatedly criticizing one project without significant familiarity with both is not just pointless, it's counterproductive to aims of FOSS privacy and security.
Can you go in branch and get that fixed?
Possibly this was hyperbole but in any case it's not correct at all.
Anecdotally, of my two EU (massive legacy French) banks, neither requires a mobile app. SMS all the way.
Even Wise, a cutting-edge neobank, does not require you to use its app. And its website accepts standard TOTP authenticator for 2FA.
Revolut is app-only, which is why I never use it.
I'm just wondering since I'm currently using 3 different European banks without any biometric authentication to unlock my phone, password manager or provide a 2FA.
I'm asking so that I can adjust in time to any new regulations I'm not aware of.
1. They have a policy of marking apps as NSFW if using them has a high probability of loading NSFW content onto the device. We can't easily rule this out. It's a small project so they have to be reserved about compliance issues because they don't have the resources to defend against expensive litigation and they could just be exercising an abundance of caution.
2. They're trolling Republicans with malicious compliance. They don't like the laws being enacted, they know the people enacting them like the Bible, so they apply the policy in the way which is maximally adversarial to the opponents imposing it on them. "If you don't like the consequences of your law then feel free to repeal it."
Which one of these is even objectionable? It seems like you want that if they're doing the second one they should admit to it, but in that case they're just maintaining kayfabe. The trolling is more effective when it's ambiguous. It's obvious that it could be that. If the message is to invite their opponents to go eat sand then it's not being lost in translation. But making that explicit only makes it easier to dismiss them as antagonists, or retaliate against them for being overtly defiant.
Whereas if they play it straight, what is someone going to say? That it shouldn't apply to this, right? Okay, then we need to pin down the rules for how exceptions work. Exceptions that could then be applied to other things. Which is to their advantage to have their opponents doing in this context because then they want the exceptions to be broad and reasonable instead of not caring if someone else is getting screwed by them.
You are saying this like GrapheneOS only runs on some unobtanium hardware. I can literally hop on my bike and pick up a phone that runs GrapheneOS in 5 minutes, every day of the week. Also, it's available in pretty much all price classes except maybe a 100-200 Euro phone that runs on a Unisoc CPU. Pixel 9a regularly goes for 350 Euro here and you can go all the way up to an expensive flagship with a Pixel Fold (or anything in between). Even in the 100-200 bracket you can probably pick up a refurbished 8a that should still be supported until 2031.
I know that they are not sold in every country, but worst case it should be possible to get your hands on one second hand or refurbished.
I critisize precisely because I don't understand what you're talking about. The last relevant VM escape was in 2006, discovered by Rutkowska herself. Since then, nothing could access my secrets in an offline vault VM. I would appreciate a clarification, how GrapheneOS can be more secure without reliable virtualization.
AFAIK Xen security relies on 100k LoC. And this is in addition to the virtualization. How many LoC does GrapheneOS require to provide its security? How can it have less attack surface than Xen? Developers replying to me here never provided an understandable reasoning, only keep repeating that it's "very, very secure", without even mentioning any threat model.
Doesn't GrapheneOS rely on closed Google's hardware to provide its security? I would never trust Google with that. How can I not critisize such approach?
No SMS at all (which is not surprising, because SMS is not secure).
Also, IMO fingerprint/face-based authentication is much nicer/quicker, especially for online payment flows like iDEAL (Dutch predecessor to Wero). And banks here work on GrapheneOS, so not much is lost.
My wording was bad, sorry; but try to install their app just once. After that, I'd bet you won't ever be able to go back to SMS validation (which is what I was talking about at the end of my comment).
If not, I'd be curious to know the banks you're talking about (to consider switching to them, for one thing). What I said above is true of Caisse d'Epargne, HSBC, CCF, among others.
Meanwhile, others are completely free to fork numerous GrapheneOS improvements or benefit from their upstream improvements (as some have, including Google).
Why can't you understand that?
Until they don't.
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Fortuneo (internet-only subsidiary of Crédit Mutuel) and LCL. I have had both their apps installed at points in the past. In both cases they defaulted back to SMS 2FA upon uninstalling, though I remember worrying I would have the problem you describe.
Ultimately I can't see how a bank could get away with forcing (rather than just pushing) existing customers to install an app. This would surely be a breach of contract.