this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
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"If we let you control your phones you'll just mess them up!"
Which is our right. I paid for the phone. Google, Samsung, and Apple aren’t fucking paying me.
There, I fixed it. It's time for a new FOSS phone OS to take over. GrapheneOS looks nice, but it only runs on select Google pixel devices. Maybe if phone manufacturers were forced to let the user chose their OS?
I would love to get GrapheneOS or some other similar OS but the lack of mobile tap-to-pay support just kills the idea for me.
I have this little offline only single purpose device that handles tap to pay for me. It is actually waterproof, survives falls, is light enough to not be noticed, and hasn't run out of battery in a few years.
Jokes aside, what is wrong with good old plastic cards? If you don't want an extra wallet (which I need anyway to carry ids, drivers license, cash, emergency ear plugs, a handy sticker or two...), just get a phone case with card/cash slot thingies.
As it is right now, my cell phone replaces a collection of about six plastic cards. I have not yet found a wieldy phone case that has space to store payment cards.
Realistically, this question could also be asked with cash. If you're going to be pulling out a wallet-like item anyway, and you are that concerned with privacy, why not go with anonymous, fee-free, secure, actually offline paper money? Card processing is not offline. The card machine has to be connected to the Internet for it to work (offline card processing theoretically exists, but is not widely implemented enough to rely on and is not particularly secure).
If people are going to argue that wanting to pay with a cell phone instead of a plastic card makes me lazy because the card takes a few extra seconds to use compare to the phone, I'm going to argue in turn that they're lazy for using a card when using cash, with all of its privacy benefits, also only takes a few seconds more.
How can you spend time thinking about phones, when there are children starving to death in Africa! See, I am can do that too.
Besides, I do carry cash for everyday expenses, and I do prefer cash. I don't know where you got that idea from.
But the question was to replace tap-to-pay. Sadly, tapping people with a fiver makes them irritated at best.
I've got nothing against you. I'm just not willing to accept a lecture (from other people, not you) about being "lazy" for wanting tap-to-pay on my cell phone. My statement is that the convenience of tap-to-pay for payment cards and transit passes is not worth the otherwise marginal privacy benefit of switching to Graphene.
I understood that, and I disagree with that statement either.
A plastic card has no wifi, mobile radio, gps, cameras or microphone. The only data it can give away is "john smith paid here for porn and liquor at 4:20". A phone has all of the above, and uses them to collect data about you, which is then used against you. Graphene, by not running all the vendor-specific, preinstalled garbage in the background, is a lot better in that regard than any smartphone you can buy at the store.
So, in my opinion, it is worth to give up the small convenience of tap-to-pay with a phone and use tap-to-pay with a card. Yes, cash would be even better, but better is the enemy of good. Paying with Monero in a dark alley while wearing a ski mask is even better than that, right?
I’d love to own my own devices but I’m so addicted to my phone I can’t handle pulling out my lighter, smaller, always charged debit card and so will continue to give up my ownership rights so I can continue to be mildly inconvenienced.
I'd love to stay private, but I'm so addicted to giving my financial information to banks that I can't handle pulling out a lighter, fee-free, no-Internet-access-required, and nearly universally-accepted banknote from my wallet and so will continue to give up data about my spending so I can continue to be mildly inconvenienced.
Debit card? You let your bank know where you're spending money??? Cash only for privacy
(I don't actually follow this, I like credit cards and their rewards points, unless it's actually cheaper to use cash)
If you own a smartwatch that supports tap to pay, you can use that instead.
I don't wear a watch at all. I view smart watches in particular as completely useless gadgets. What useful thing do they do that a cell phone doesn't? Count your heart rate? Sell that info to advertisers so they know what time you stay up at night doom-scrolling? They have absolutely no utility for me.
I was looking at that too and came to the same conclusion. I should probably migrate off apple at some point but Android in its current state is not viable for me.
What about it isn't viable? Genuinely curious
I can’t use it stock because cell providers can push bullshit apps I don’t want without my permission and I can’t fully disable Gemini. Switching to grapheneOS addresses those concerns, but cause new problems, like killing tap to pay and triggering security flags on games and banking apps.
Yeah that's a fair point. Some android models do have minimal or none bloatware, like Google pixel... But also then papa Google owns your ass lol
I was actually looking at moving to a pixel fold but the Gemini shit that I can’t turn off turned me away. The Samsung fold7 is incredibly tempting too, but again, I refuse to use their adware riddled shit.
Honestly having used a pixel 6 for the last few years, I've never seen or noticed the Gemini stuff.
It’s a change Google recently announced. Going forward, you can turn off some of your interactions with Gemini but it will continue running the background anyway, collecting data and shit, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Bruhhh
I am reading this with a rooted LineageOS phone with MicroG installed.
wasn't there also some concern about messing up the radio communication for a lot of users?
the idea was that you actually can't mess with radio communications. if you send too much data, it kinda clogs the airspace of radio frequencies and that' actually illegal to do in many countries. rooting the android phone lets you access the radio antenna directly, and you can't let playful nerds mess up the city's mobile internet for a million inhabitants every other day. especially since the source of interference would be hard to track down.
Now i wonder what that would mean for mobile internet usb peripherals that you can plug into linux laptop and desktop machines. how do they solve this issue?
Rooting the phone means playful nerds could potentially mess up radio frequencies, but they can already do that because they can build radios using readily available electronic components. We already have all kinds of regulations about radio use, and we go after people who actually cause problems.