Andreas Schwab comments about the EU and Google's SafetyNet

Andreas Schwab (Rapporteur in the European Parliament on fair digital markets) published an article last week in which he explains the importance of creating fair competition in the digital space in the EU + how Google currently tries to undermine this with its ‘SafetyNet’-service:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/opinion/time-to-restore-fairness-and-contestability-in-digital-markets/

New legislation by the EU, the DMA, will help to fight practises like this in the future. Good news for Murena and /e/OS!

Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/ the unGoogled mobile OS and online servicesphone

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“Apps that include SafetyNet do not work on any other Android version than Google’s own version. This forces consumers to use Google’s Android version if they wish to use, for example, the most common banking app.”

Is this true?

I think Google has built in a lot of hurdles.
Whatsapp probably also has preferential access to the deeper system levels on Apple and Android than other messengers. For this, Whatsapp delivers the chats (backups) unencrypted to the cloud of Apple and Google for analysis.
Thanks to all those who tacitly accept this (irony off).
Google and Meta are not our Friends.

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For me it’s true: from Aurora store, I can install Fideuram banking apps but they don’t work because not from Google Play Store.

Aurora pulls the app from Google AFAIK so they should be identical. MicroG includes / offers SafetyNet check but at least in your case it is not working like it should?!

If you check your SafetyNet status inside MicroG what is displayed?

SafetyNet on and ok:

I think it would be more true the other way around in an “Apps should be working 100% on non-custom ROMs” and a “if it’s somehow not working out for you with a particular App on non-custom ROMs there’s a chain of responsibility/support in place to deal with that” sense.

microG can try its best to mimic Google services for Google-dependent Apps, and it does a really good job overall, but if it doesn’t work for a particular use case, that’s that for the moment then until microG might be able to improve further.
microG is an Open Source effort without any guarantee to work. The phone vendor has no responsibility to fix problems with this, the App vendor has no responsibility to fix problems with this, Google has no responsibility to fix problems with this.

This is different when you use the same App with the stock OS with all the Google stuff from your phone vendor. Might still not help in getting a solution quickly, if in doubt, but in principle the responsibilities are there.

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