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If the official X app stopped working for you (f.e. if you are using @GrapheneOS ), or your banking apps aren't working anymore, the problem might be hardware-based attestation. Unfortunately, despite winning many battles for an open internet, open code, open protocols, and file formats, hardware attestation is a problem that most of us aren't even aware of. And it's a big problem for the Internet.
Juraj Bednar
The Internet and Computers Aren't What They Used to Be: Why Your Apps Stopped Working (Hardware Attestation)
I was prompted to write this article when the X (Twitter) app stopped working on my phone. The culprit? New technologies that are fundamentally res...

Replies (12)

My dream is an open mobile platform. I know there were several attempts in the past, that did not get from 0 to even 0.01. Mostly because of lack of market / interest, as most people are fine with the googleapple hegemony. My dream is that at some point it could grow out of the DIY hardware signer -- specter, seedsigner -- and home miner -- bitaxe -- ecosystem. A de-facto standard, with several manufacturers, open platform, interchangable software, and full package providers. It will not be on par with latest mobile hardware, and that should not be the goal, but a general purpose mobile computer and communications platform.
↩ replying to Juraj
I have no illusions: for some 'essential' services I will need a fallback 'normie' phone (like messaging the daycare or school staff, ordering a pizza, a netbank if you need one, digital driving license or shit like that if you cannot really avoid it at some point). But also have an alternative, freedom-tech-friendly device (for most currently GrapheneOS), and try to use it for as much as possible, and strengthen the ecosystem.
As I've been saying about the Apps-walled-gardens problem for years: The best way to fight is: Use services via websites & browser. The principle: use it or lose it. You _have_ to give companies a financial incentive to keep services accessible via websites. You _have_ to give managers statistics that say: we've had 30 % of interactions with our service via the website, we cannot lose this. If people 95 % opt for the App, because "muh, App has so much better UI/UX than browser" they'll turn off websites as soon as they can. Same goes for websites working with Firefox/derivatives: if you want maintainers to make sure their websites work well with FF, you have to use FF and thus flood their servers with your FF user agent. If shops risk missing revenue by their website not working for people with buying power .. they will make sure their site works with the browser.
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↩ replying to lifeisjustreplication
True, but also let's be realistic about the impact. Lifetime value of a customer is quite low, there are definitely not millions of us. And then you have to consider the costs as well. Even 10% of users using only web might be a losing proposition for them, because the cost is also developing parallel web app (in addition to iOS and Android app) and fighting spam, bots and user scripts. With the attestation they can be fairly sure that the client is not a script, etc. Maybe not in theory, but definitely in practice. It might very well be that switching off the web will increase profit despite losing a significant percentage of customers. Also my particular one action, especially if it's free service has basically zero say in this, it's a rounding error. And I can only influence my actions and native a few hundred people (but realistically, probably a few dozen).