I love some kind of porting/develop a wide used app for the librem, but there are a lot of apps very important like apps from your country, banks and so on, that soon on later even must be used.
That’s why i hope it will be an effort to make a good and out of the box experience with anbox or something else.
Of course it’s very important that this box is very very hardened, i don’t want my country apps to spy me with my librem
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The bank apps require the real android, android services. This proprietary system has the security packages the bank apps use. Anbox is being worked on, but it won’t allow all android apps to run. Let’s see how the websites work on the phone screen (with the full Firefox you can control what version of the website you see). Services and businesses shouldn’t require everyone to have a smartphone.
I think the fund is to get native apps. Supporting governments to make sure their services are functional for all is more important then Frankensteining their apps. Which could break on the next release.
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Not really in my case. I use two “official” German banking apps on my Pixel with GrapheneOS (nothing proprietary system-wise like Play Services) and they are working fine.
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Exceptions don’t invalidate the rule. Dean is correct, many apps take advantage of specific api’s that require the google suite to function. These apps will not work.
Even on de-googled Android (e Foundation, for example) they have microG which is sort of like Wine. However it is a must or most of the apps people want to use wont work.
I do think it would be ridiculous for any country to force an app. Are they forcing you to have a smartphone as well?
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Just a pre-requisite for the mark on your hand or forehead I’m afraid. Wait a second, isn’t that where we use our phones? Either held in the hand or next to the ear, by our foreheads?
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That is becoming a pretty outdated position. Services used not to require electronic paymets in some countries. I remember when services never required bank accounts, or having phones at all.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. Perhaps that the change doesn’t come from adhering to the requirements, but from demanding that requirements be more inclusive.
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Some require you to have phone, smart or not.
I may give them my landline, which has a modem hooked up to a loopback RS-232 (no computer). Answers on the first ring, screeeeeeeeeeccchhhh.
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Yeah, I’m coming from an inclusive and accessibility position. I work in telecommunications and while replacing the POTS we connect people’s phones to modems and a few old people don’t want the internet and got very anxious about it all. I spent a while telling them it’s an adaptor, wifi is turned off, and they are paying the same price as before.
I’m more referring to having to have an Android or iPhone app. If for some reason Apple povits and removes your app, you lose half your USA customers.
I know people with disabilities (dexterity and visual issues) and smartphones are a horrible interface. Most have one but only for necessity. These people are able to do a lot, but society is dis-abling them to live their lives.
Or use at least an open standard IF that is independent of specific smartphone brands. I mean something as a modernized SMS or switch all to matrix protocol.
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P.S. My landline is also DSL, the landline comes with.
This.
Any such apps should have documented APIs, and preferably reference implementations, so that people are not locked into running them on Surveillance Capitalism smartphones.
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Purism already reported that Anbox is working.
I don’t know whether it is a good out-of-the-box experience or whether it is adequately hardened, however.
I will still try to avoid running any Android app at all.
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You can make your own bank apps . Librem 5 will have the ability to make apps of sort by pulling the website out of the browser and having it act as a stand alone .
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About a year ago, we got my 87 year old father a Grand Pad. It’s a tablet that has been customized to meet the needs of the elderly. We replaced his old landline with it because he was unhappy about all of the junk calls and the volume was too low. With the Grand Pad, we set things up to block all calls except from people in my sister’s directory (family, friends, his doctors, etc…). That worked out well except he never got comfortable making and receiving calls through an Android interface, no matter how simple we made it for him. So just recently, we purchased an old fashioned landline phone for him that was customized for the elderly. I am an Engineer and found it difficult at that, to program-in all of the customizations that he needed in to that phone. But after about three hours, I had it working to block all calls except for numbers that I entered in to memory manually, and to set-up six speed dial numbers for him. The phone announces verbally who is calling before he answers (from caller ID). He is happy with it. It works like phones always worked when he was younger such as having a dial tone, and has special features for the elderly (like super loud volume and call filtering), to meet his current needs. But without having someone young and technically inclined to set it up for him, the newer technology would have left him behind. In previous generations, he could have remained more independent in to later years. We’re becoming way too dependant on our mobile devices and way too susceptible to invasive contact from strangers. Some day, no one will even remember the days when people wrote checks and your phone only rang when someone familiar to you was calling.
Once I have a Librem 5 to do most of my communications with, I’ll switch back to a PC if necessary for bill paying and everything else, if I have to. Privacy and freedom from extreme surveilance is worth giving up the latest features for.
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In general I agree, but (personally) not for banking apps. On my current Android,
- I never used a banking app, because (AFAIK) in my case it would eliminate one factor. I prefer a TAN generator or SMS TAN. Some would say the latter has weaknesses, but well, at least it IS a second factor, while just having the app is not.
- I never even used the bank website on my mobile, because I simply don’t trust an Android device. This will be different on the Librem 5. No apps that spy on personal data.
Just to be sure: I know that in theory a PureOS/Debian package could be compromised as well. But that will be a scandal. On Android, I’m so used to reading about compromised apps, I don’t even bother reading more than the headlines. I just accepted that I can’t entrust important data to my phone.
On the Librem 5 I might even consider storing passwords. Another thing I never did on the two Androids that served me the last 11 years.
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My ISP/telecoms provider did this for me not long ago after I reported a fault on my landline. Only after the engineer left did it really occur to me what the change involved. A traditional landline is independent of any other infrastructure at the consumer’s dwelling. I am old enough to remember interruptions to electricity supplies during times of poor industrial relations (although not old enough to be scared of the internet 
). You could still use the telephone, because the whole POTS system was powered independently (and got priority for electricity supply), and and the basic handsets that most people used back then got their power from the line they were connected to. This meant that you could report a gas leak or call for an ambulance during a power outage.
I guess that this picture is no longer wholly accurate: a “separate” internet line and telephone line will still converge somewhere fairly close by and depend on the same local infrastructure. Also mobile phones didn’t exist in those days. And yet… the change still made me feel slightly uncomfortable. My cable provider’s router is based on kit from a manufacturer that doesn’t have a very high reputation, and I now depend on it for my fixed phone line which I didn’t before. I can’t replace it with a router of my own choice. I also get occasional power outages where I live now, and I’m glad that I have a UPS that the router is attached to (but I am sure that most people won’t do that).
The model of making consumer-facing technology for basic services as simple and robust as possible is still one that deserves consideration, IMHO.
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a cellular modem is ‘smart’ no matter if it’s in a nokia 3310 or bleeding-edge-smartphone (SOC) however the latter is more dangerous if it’s not isolated from the main CPU because it has access to main memory (which is BAD).
if it is isolated from the main-memory as is the case of the L5 then at WORST it can snoop on your external communications but NOT any different non-cellular related activities you do on your phone … you lose that advantage if you use a non-free-software operating-system as that might contain a few lines of code hidden somewhere that COULD contact ‘HOME’ …
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By this do you mean
- you just purchased a regular phone, went back to the landline and ditched the Grand Pad, OR
- you purchased a regular handset and interfaced it to the Grand Pad, potentially using a VoIP ATA (so that you get the best of both worlds)? [In other words the Grand Pad still does the call blocking, directory, speed dials etc. but the user interface goes back to the way it was. If the Grand Pad runs Android, it may or may not even be possible to do that but if you can install an open source operating system, the sky’s the limit.]
Out of curiosity, is the “old fashioned landline phone” rotary dial or button dial?
Bottom line though is that you are right … the customer has to be comfortable using the device and if the device does not get used because the customer is not comfortable then the device is pointless.
I have DSL, which is still copper, as I said in another post, the landline goes with it.
Regarding the modem that I mentioned in the same post, it is an old courier v.anything, with a 25-pin RS-232 port. Before I hooked up the loopback connector so it would auto-answer, I put a dumb terminal on it and started playing with the old ATDT commands and it would dial out. Then for grins I used an ATDP command for pulse dial. It still worked!
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As an add-on to my story, we ditched the grand pad completely and he uses the landline only now. The new phone has physical push buttons (not a display screen with buttons on it). A rotary phone might be more comfortable for him, if it even would work any more. Today’s phone system might require the pulses to be converted to tones in the phone itself. I suppose the pulses could be simulated in the user’s ear piece and the tones blocked from the user hearing them. But his phone uses standard push-button DTMF tones. But, we couldn’t escape VOIP technology completely. With Cox cable TV phone service, you do get a landline (of sorts) that looks, feels, and acts like a bonified old fashioned landline. The dial tone is the same. Everything for the user is exactly the same. That works for my elderly father. But there is no twisted pair of wires involved. The cable that supplies a signal to the TV splits. One side goes in to the cable box for the TV and the other side goes in to a modem. The phone plugs in to the modem. I had forgotten that one detail because of how well Cox phone service mimics the POTS system. I don’t think that POTS service is available where he lives. If it is available, it’s probably $60/month and not the $10/month add-on he pays to Cox TV. So when his power goes out, his phone will go out too.
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