Not sure I completely understand the thought here, apologies. Are you considering just emulating Android for some specific apps that only exist as apps? Seems a probable approach. I suppose extending that, one could even just emulate the apps on a computer at home and remote desktop into the computer from their phone to run them, although that’d be possibly obtuse.

May I ask what country has apps that require government ID to run on their phone for certain things? That seems a bit dystopian.

I don’t get why banking apps are such a difficult deal-killer for people. Banks have web sites. But also, what are people doing? Running their bank app to daily transfer money back and forth from/to checking and savings?

Have you ever tried running Android apps on Graphene? Most run just fine without Play Services, many even have smaller degoogled versions. Some Play-only apps may have an error dialog here or there, but very few just flat don’t work at all. Graphene + Obtainium config to pull apps in from various sources and manage updating them. Maybe a few sideloads. About as zero Google as one can get on a modern smartphone.

Many apps have no reason to ever have network access. Block away until you start seeing feedback in the app logs.

Apps like Android Easter Egg do not need network access. Go from there and hit what needs to be blocked.

No more new hardware beyond Pixel 9 for the foreseeable future though, and Graphene’s ODM partner (if it even pans out) will be using Qualcomm chips, which is a US military contractor and not known for good security.

Rethink actually seems to block Play Services if you choose to configure Rethink a certain way. It is delightful watching Play Services become more and more desperate. Trying other states, other countries, and even other Google devices on your local network in a desperate attempt to get online and shit telemetry back to Google.

Same can’t be said about iOS. Apple routes their 17.x.x.x network and other traffic outside userspace, immune to even full-tunnel VPN. Android networking isn’t that capable.

Captive audience on the contracts side, so they can do whatever they want as crappy as they want and the contracts still generate revenue.

You wanted a usable product? Stay away from Big Tech anymore.

They used to have very comprehensive automated testing processes to exercise all sorts of things. Unfortunately, like many tech companies these days like Apple, Google, etc., they’re all punting QA as a concept because they just don’t care - what are you going to do, go use another oligopoly platform?

All these brainwashed AI-obsessed people should be required to watch I, Robot on loop for a month or two.

The problem comes in so many directions in real life though. Say your company has a very large database. Replicating it across regions means you’re paying for data ingress/egress and more than one region’s copy of that already sharded and/or duplicated database. It even applies when transferring data across AZs in a given region. Backing it up to S3 is expensive, backing it up to Glacier is cheaper, until you ever have to do a restore, and then you have to lay off half the staff to pay for it.

Other issues can arise, possibly through the fault of yourself, sometimes at the fault of Amazon, if data traffic routing has a glitch and data is routing to the wrong place. The onus either way is on your company to show Amazon the receipts if you expect to get credits for the overage. At larger scale, this could be hundreds of thousands of dollars in overage. Easy to torpedo smaller companies with one mistake.

They didn’t used to nickel and dime as hard as they do now, which doesn’t help, but outside of history, they set up AWS to be the biggest slippery slope of wallet-deletion, as almost every move you make costs money. Entire companies exist to manage your AWS costs (for more money, of course) and other companies’ products you may use that are hosted in your infra may accidentally delete your wallet if you don’t constantly monitor them.

Using AWS cost-efficiently is only accomplished by ostensibly day-trading your cloud resources like a high frequency stock trader, capitalizing on unpopular/weird system types, and keeping your code as portable as possible.

…but if one didn’t care about cost, one would probably get pretty good reliability out of them, sure.

There are cheap Chinese ODMs that make trackers for companies. Used to be a “cube” branded tracker that was for keys, not sure there still is. Never used the app, just used LightBlue explorer (free app) to scan for BLE devices and noted its MAC address. The app shows signal strength.

If you have to find your thing, you just point your phone around and watch the signal until it gets stronger. Same process the fancy apps use without the creeper crap. This app also let’s you find any of your devices broadcasting a beacon. Fitbit, watch, whatever.

Not trying to sound negative in tone, to prefix. Just more factual.

Need is a strong word. Browser can do banking. So can computer, tablet, the bank itself. Check deposit is one thing that an “app” is needed for but happens exceedingly rarely these days. One could also keep an old Android phone around just for that banking app if the usage was important enough. One could also go back to cash, although that has other bulky/theft issues.

Maps also can be done in browser, or open Android map apps like Organic Maps ported.

Digital wallets aren’t really “needed” in the world, there are still non-phone-based techs to replace them. Sure, it’s great having an empty pocket with nothing but a phone, but that is a pure luxury, not a need. Might actually be a good time for more people to stop using “smart” tech to keep non-smart tech in prevalence.

Remember too, all these finance-based “conveniences” are there just so every company along the way can vacuum up all your transactions. Google Wallet gets to see every card/purchase you use/do, for example, even when not using the phone for the purchase.

Fund a dev, volunteer time, and devs need to drop iOS and Android projects and focus on this.

Mac does the same thing (as others have said) and you can at least sudo lsof and find it, but somehow filesystem access now is worse than Windows 95 era Excel spreadsheet file handles that never worked.

Here’s what an operating system is peeps: Something that handles files and programs that live on top of it. That’s it.

How is it none of them can’t do their basic function anymore?

Meanwhile you can still cherry-pick the tip, and go right to the head, and fork away.

Office Space. But also, Been in all those. It’s weird to remember that your employer doesn’t actually want you to be productive and fix the problems to be profitable. They want to appear to be doing that. You’ll go further in your career by playing those games rather than working. I, unfortunately, like doing the work to keep the company going instead of the games, which is not as profitable for myself, but it keeps the company from dying even though they don’t realize it, and keeps them rich. Win? I’d rather be planting corn at this point.

They’ll probably extend it at least through the 2038 bug.

To expand, staring at walls like that is often a sign of distress that may require immediate medical attention. This being a meme sub, the image is probably on its 40th recycle and scenario is completely unrelated.

That’s asking a lot, these days.