I haven’t been able to update my cellphone anonymously with Aurora since January. Every time I try, Aurora errors out with “Oops, you are rate limited”.
This isn’t the first time Google plays at making non-normies’ lives difficult. So I tried the usual tricks, updated Aurora, tried the nightly build, waited, tried again… for months - to no avail: Google just won’t play ball this time.
Last week, Signal stopped working and demanded to be updated. Fortunately, Signal offers the APK as a normal download without having to get it from the hateful Google Play store.
Today, my home banking identificator app did the same thing and stopped working. I needed to make a payment right now, and I had no way to update the app: “Oops, you are rate limited”. And my bank sure doesn’t offer the APK outside of anything but the goddamn Google Play store.
So I relented and created a Google account. Which of course entailed giving Google a phone number. I sure didn’t give them mine, so I phoned a friend abroad who doesn’t care to ask him to receive the verification SMS on his phone and read out the code to me. Which worked long enough to set up 2FA and do away with phone numbers altogether. And finally, after an hour of fucking around, annoying other people and compromising their phone number, I could update my banking app and make my payment at last.
All that because Google has decided they want to control my phone.
Fuck Google.
Seriously, how they are allowed to hold the Android world hostage like this without getting their monopolistic ass Sherman’ed AT&T-style, I’ll never know. It’s long overdue.
I live in a country where the government provides a lot of services online, and have delegated the task of identifying people to the banks. You literally can’t live without a cellphone and without the secure ID app of your bank here. Well, you can I guess, but then your life become extremely difficult to do anything at all, however trivial.
Oh, ffs. What a phenomenally fucked up idea (and we all know it was done intentionally by both people in banking and government, to glean yet more info and gain more control).
Sorry you have to deal with this BS.
DivestOS (and Lineage I’m pretty sure) enables you to run MicroG under a specific user account only. Wonder if that would help for you?
Or, if an Android VM hosted on a VPS would work.
You’re living in the future.
Not sure why people are downvoting you. This is what power brokers around the world are working hard to implement everywhere.
It’s slowly rolling this way in SEA now too
No, they’re just not living in the pseudo-first-world country like the US.
Sweden?
Sounds like BankID (and feja?). Remember to support DFRI and their fight to being open, independent standards for identification.
What’s DFRI?
Edit: never mind i got it
Time to run graphene with the app in a separate profile with MicroG if you need it
You can order a key generator so you don’t need to use Secure ID app. You can also use your digital signature for everything.