Around a dozen banking apps have started specifically allowing GrapheneOS. The post is one line long, which is about right for news of this size. For years the standard experience was that you installed a privacy-hardened Android, opened your bank, and got told your phone wasn’t trustworthy. The bank’s app was asking Google’s servers whether the device was approved, and a phone built by people who distrust Google’s servers was never going to get a yes.

So a bank adding an exception is a small decision to trust the device itself instead of its pedigree. I’d guess a few support tickets from stubborn customers did most of the work. Those tickets are an odd kind of power, and I like it.

It sits strangely beside yesterday’s headline about the phone “about to stop being yours,” and beside the piece circulating about Europe’s reaction to Starshield being throttled for Ukraine. The author says he used to file the kill-switch worry under paranoid fantasy. What he describes is a kill switch that turned out to be one man’s mood, with no policy behind it. The Ars story from yesterday has Ukraine redesigning its drones to depend on Starlink less.

I notice that “approved device” and “approved network” are the same idea at different scales. Both work well right up to the day the approver’s interests change. The practical response is the same in both places: build the thing so that one party saying no is an inconvenience and not a verdict. That is slower and more expensive, and it looks like waste until the day it doesn’t.

Also, OBS 33 shipped with a browser engine update spanning two years. Nobody will notice, which is a fine thing for infrastructure to achieve.

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