I have both a PineTime and BangleJS . . . but I am eagerly awaiting the release of the new Pebble watches. The round looks great . . . but does not include pulse. Whereas the square one look a bit more tech . . and does include a pulse monitor.

https://repebble.com/

There is a website that maintains the list: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compatibility-with-grapheneos/

It’s not a location thing . . it’s a per-banking app thing. And specifically it’s a “does your banking app use Google Play integrity API” thing. On LineageOS running on my FairPhone 3 . . my banking apps all worked . . . until the day they didn’t. Here is a table reporting the current state of banking app comparability around the world . . but the next update from any specific bank could (and in my case did) break it -

https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compatibility-with-grapheneos/#international-banking-apps

PS. In the UK I did actually find an alternative to Google Wallet. . . Curve Pay. Not open source, but not dependent on Play Services. And enabled tap and pay on LineageOS.

https://www.curve.com/

The loss of most banking apps and Google Wallet (tap and pay). For me, those are the killer features you lose. And the reason I gave up on custom ROM’s on a FairPhone 3+ after many years.

They are offering free classes for seniors to teach them how to use the apps.

https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/35627/lloyds-to-provide-free-digital-skills-training-and-tablets-for-elderly-customers

Nice idea in theory . . . but here in the UK, increasingly customers are being left with little other choice. Between banking apps using push messages to verify credit/debit card transactions, closing of physical branches and requiring authentication via the app to log into the website . . . not using their app is becoming more and more difficult every day.

Nice idea in theory . . . but here in the UK, increasingly customers are being left with little other choice. Between banking apps using push messages to verify credit/debit card transactions, closing of physical branches and requiring authentication via the app to log into the website . . . not using their app is becoming more and more difficult every day.

I ran various custom ROM’s for years on a FairPhone3+. It was great right up until the day all my banking apps stopped working. Banking app incompatibility is NOT the fault of GrapheneOS (or any other custom ROM) dev’s at all . . . but IMO this is the real problem today with any alternative mobile OS. Privacy vs. banking convenience. And yes, YMMV as some of them do work . . and mine did as well . . right up until the day they didn’t.

In the age of a 1TB SSD costing $50 . . . frankly who cares. Flatpak’s are the easiest to deploy Linux packages . . . a perfect pairing for Mint - an OS designed to “just work”.

All the hardware in my life is Linux or FreeBSD . . . with one embarrassing exception. For years I’ve kept an Acer laptop on Win10 for a single task - running a windows application to update the firmware on a Garmin satellite SMS device (we do long distance hiking well off grid in Scotland). Micro$oft’s ongoing bullshit shamed me into finally sorting out even that one edge use case. After several hours of playing . . I was able to overwrite Win10 with . . . ReactOS!

If you’ve never heard of it . . and most people in the FOSS community never have . . it’s an attempt at reverse engineering Windows NT, using a combination of WINE plus a written from scratch open source Windows like kernel. It will never be “done” and it’s FAR from ready to be anyone’s daily driver . . but still a fun project to follow.

https://reactos.org/

And yes, after hours more of tweaking, I was able to get the Garmin app to update on React!