alt Hacker NewsI don't care about any of these, I just want to be able to have whatever Google pay does without Google.
You could claim that's not an android problem but if you do I don't think you've ever had to explain to people your phone doesn't have a Google Play store.
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We had that for many years. But banks stopped supporting their own payment solutions because despite not having to pay commission to Google, it was more expensive to support their own solutions.
That should also tell you that almost any open source / non-profit solution is doomed to fail due to costs. What could work is if, just like the UnifiedAttestation initiative has commercial backing, Wero is expanded to also have its own NFC payment stack. The EU already forced Apple to open up NFC, so it is possible to do it for both iOS and Android.
Why would anyone who cares enough about security/privacy to run a de-googled phone want to use a tap to pay app?
You are free to reverse engineer the whole system and find a way to make it work. The world will love you. I suspect there will be a Google hardware attestation at the core of it, but understanding how it works is still huge progress.
blows my mind that there’s not a single open solution for mobile wallets and nobody is saying anything.
A phone case with your NFC credit card in a pocket on the back. Boom, problem solved.
My bank had NFC payments for years. None of the remote attestation bullshit. I think it used Google's library for doing QR code scans so it wouldn't work without Google Play, but that's beside the point.
Android already supports this, and has supported this for over a decade. The restriction here is on the side of the finance ecosystem. Everyone has congregated on doing Apple/Google Pay because it's cheap and easy to maintain compared to the alternative. Cards companies and banks make deals with Google, just like they do with companies like Apple, Samsung, and Garmin.
Any fintech startup with serious backing can create an Android app that works on any ROM you can imagine. I don't think you'd have an easy time finding investors for this with how much money you need to partake in the ecosystem, but the API is ready for you to implement.
Google should've been broken up eons ago.
Walt https://walt.is/ is building exactly that in Europe. They claim first tap to pay will happen later this year.
Some European banks including mine offer NFC payments via their app as well. You don't need Google services.