Volkswagen has decided to add some ‘Play Integrity Device Level’ in their Android App, making it stop working on my FP4 /e/OS phone. I have complained heavily, and this is the latest answer from VW:
“The application you are using is not an official offering of Volkswagen AG. Therefore, we are unfortunately unable to provide technical support for questions or issues related to this third-party app. Please contact the application provider directly.
The reason for this is that the technical connection previously used by some third parties was not intended as an official third-party access. As part of a technical transition, access is being moved to documented and standardized interfaces. If a third party has not yet implemented this migration, this may result in limitations within the respective third-party application. The use of Volkswagen’s mobile online services, for example via the Volkswagen app, is not affected.”
Can Murena please help me out by providing the necessary support in /e/OS?
There is already another thread in this forum covering this issue and the conclusion is that /e/OS cannot do anything and it is not really their problem: if google wants to offer to app developers a mean to block non Google-Android systems, we cannot prevent them. Today we can merely judge ourselves lucky that google and app developers did not lock yet most banking apps and government apps on non-google devices.
What we can do is to make such restrictions unworthy for companies like VW, by not choosing their cars and apps. Unfortunately they manufacture good cars and they are hard to avoid. To make the consequences known earlier to VW, you can contact their marketing department and their support department to tell them you will stop buying their cars for you and in your business. Official /e/OS built are signed with a private key, Fairphones bootloader is locked, same for Huawai devices, so the safety argument the Google-Integrity checks bring does not hold.
So a parallel approach is to lobby against such unnecessary lockings (of ecosystem) at the EU commission and parliament so that they will enforce the existing laws that regulate against market concentration and monopoly/trust. Like forcing actual gate-keepers to open they standards , app-stores, music or film catalogues, etc.
As google would very certainly loose lawsuits if they lock too much their ecosystem, the more pressure there is to apply the law, the better for the consumers. If google is today tolerating app-lounge side download and not forcing all apps to run play-integrity-check, it is probably thanks to the fear of a lawsuit because current laws make it clear they will loose the trial and be forced to open wider their gates as a consequence.
Another related battle would be for government-apps (and later commercial-apps) not to rely on google-push-notification-servers and not on Google play store. Maybe some regulation will help (in that case the regulation will allow more innovation because the monopoly is what limits it in this case, so the classical argument of regulation limiting the innovation does not hold, its a balance). The innovation being here the protection of user-data and the recovery by the consumer of the google-profit that is made on the meta-data of its notifications and app-usage.