If this means that I might be able to use NFC payments because alternatives to Google Pay will exist, I am very happy. Hopefully this will also make possible to F-droid to provide auto updates.
I'm confused why you would assume that there isn't any context where someone might need to store their cards on their phone instead of carrying a wallet. Have you considering asking why instead of assuming everyone is like you? Is amazing when you get to know other perspectives.
Last I checked making a statement stating that you're confused about something counts, semantically, as a question. No question mark needed.
But, fine, if you don't want to tell me you don't have to. I'm able to contain my curiosity. Certainly can't put my ID, driver's license, cash, and a hair tie into my phone. Nor, for that matter, put my phone into an ATM.
I can store my government issued ID, a driver's licence, store limited cash behind my phone cover. And do cardless withdrawal from ATM if I need more. I have not needed a hair tie but if I did I'd wrap it on my wrist. Have not carried a wallet in years.
As of last month, I can now, in fact, store my driver's license on my phone. Can't wait to use it for nights out with friends, no risk of losing my purse and the app even hides your address unless you specifically allow it, so no skeevy bartenders can read my address when they "card" me :)
I can usually pull out my phone faster than taking a card out of my wallet.
Phone-based cards typically have significantly higher limits than physical cards. (I can tap hundreds of dollars with my phone, only about $100 on my card.)
The phone needs to be unlocked which is safer than the card which just needs to be tapped with no other authentication.
Until earlier this year, I could make NFC payments with the app of my credit card company. AFAIK contactless payments on Android were never locked to Google Pay/Wallet. But I have no idea why there's no competition in this space. I'd expect e.g. PayPal to have something, but if they do I never heard of it - and I did look once, briefly.
Because to implement this you need to negotiate with individual credit card issuers. Basically how this works is that your phone is being issued a virtual card with the keys locked inside the phone's HSM. Then it can be used to make NFC payments just like any physical card. So you need 1. contracts with many card providers, 2. card issuance processes with these providers 3. huge amounts of compliance bureaucracy. At the end of the day it isn't really worth it unless you are a huge company and expect to have tons of users or see it as an essential feature of your phone OS.
The funny thing is that this is probably lobbying from NTT Docomo, who lost their own app store monopoly for feature phones the moment smartphones arrived.
i can assure you japan isn't that much saner than the rest of us, like really the one big thing they have going for them is pretty good urban planning and public transport.
Where most nations have people working their asses off because they need money to buy food, japan made the innovation of having people work themselves to death mostly out of social obligation instead! Much more exciting.
How so? Honest question, I can't seem to find anything that is not super pro-corporations like the prohibition on modding consoles with tens of thousands dollar fines or even prison sentences...
I would pay a lot of money to see Nintendo's conniption over having to allow home brew and non-approved software on their game consoles. I would love to release emulators for older Nintendo consoles for the Switch so that they don't get to keep charging people again to play old games on newer consoles.
Doesn't Google already let you do this?? My Android phone doesn't even have Google Play Services, I just only use 3rd party stores. If I want an app from Google Play I get it through Aurora.
The law allows local authorities to name "designated providers" of a certain scale – currently only achieved by Apple and Google – and require those providers to do three things:
Allow third-party app stores on their devices;
Allow application developers to use third-party billing services;
Enable users to change default settings with simple procedures, and offer choice screens for tools like browsers;
And it forbids them doing three more:
Engage in any form of preferential treatment of their services over those of competitors in the display of search results without justifiable reason;
Use acquired data about competing applications for their own applications;
Prevent application developers from using features controlled by the OS with the same level of performance as the one used by Designated Providers.
So Google already allows 3rd party app stores and lots of settings (although these are always hit and miss, even in the custom ROM scene - I can't get pocket detection right now and my phone keeps doing things in my pocket), but the 3rd party billing and choice screens applies to them.
unrelated to the OP but a suggestion for your problem:
Waveup has a setting to lock the screen after X seconds with the proximity sensor covered, it's not very sophisticated and thus it can be a bit over-eager, but if the phone being interacted with by your leg while in the pocket is driving you up the wall then this should fix that.
Ty, but I think I'm just gonna switch from my dodgy Chinese Xiaomi phone to the refurbished Pixel 7 Pro I have. I mean, I've had it for like e months now, one of these days I will. Although, I really will miss my IR blaster, even though I hardly ever use it it's nice to be able to change the TV in the pub lol
Edit: lmfao I just changed the TV 10m away, had Tour de France on, but now it's basketball.
How do you acces your bank account without an app that requieres Google Play Services running? All bank accounts in Europe require a smart phone app for 2FA even when you log-in on a browser. I can install bank apps via Aurora, but almost all of them won't run without Google's Software.
Run Magisk in Zygisk mode with the deny list hiding itself from banking apps.
However I would advise not using the banking app if you can help it, they're not clean. Hell, even accessing online banking via a website seems to require connections to google.com and gstatic.com to perform hidden captcha (you don't have to do the picture thing but it still does the server side tracking).
There's no way anyone in Europe can use a bank account without a banking app. As I said, even if you log-in on a browser on a laptop, authentication still requires you grab your phone and use the banking app to authorize the log-in from that laptop once in a while, or any transaction.
Unfortunately, the solution you propose is technically too advanced for most people, including me. Is using GrapheneOS with its sandbox feature good enough of a protection?
I'm in Europe, and I don't use banking apps. For the most part anyway, one of my credit cards pissed me off by switching to app only, then eventually I relented with one bank because I wanted a 2nd account that required the app.
Banks either verify by SMS (lol) or provide a passkey fob.
GrapheneOS should provide some measure of protection. You can also perhaps disable some tracking features using something like Warden (requires root) - although this hasn't been updated in years and probably misses stuff now.
Google allows that though or do they mean access of Google Play via 3rd party apps?
Not that I am saying it might not be necessary to include Google from the start, sets a good precedence and prevents a future where they might go the Apple route.
Just hope both Google and Apple won't restrict opening up to Japanese market only. But who am I kidding, they will.
I think this means allowing the listing of third party app stores inside the Google Play Store - so you could search for F-Droid in Google Play for example instead of downloading and installing the .apk manually.
You're still putting complete trust into Google by using any android that isn't thoroughly de-googled, built from scratch, and installed on a jailbroken phone. They're integrated on the OS level they can do whatever they want.
