Use GrapheneOS. It never has this bug to begin with, as the team found and fixed it while porting the OS to Android 14. https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/111309676504712576
GrapheneOS also has many other significant privacy and security improvements compared to the stock OS, it’s definitely worth checking out.
They said that, but I couldn’t find the fix in their github repository. Does anyone know the commit that fixes this bug? It would help shed light on the technical details of the issue.
GrapheneOS is spread across many many repos. They are listed on the website: https://grapheneos.org/source#grapheneos. It’s impossible to put an entire operating system stack into one single repository.
I used GitHub’s search across the entire Graphene org, but couldn’t find any references to the issue. Doesn’t mean its not there, I just couldn’t find it. If the technical details of the issue were public, it would help people know whether or not their data is recoverable if they are already stuck with a “pixel is starting…” phone that doesn’t boot.
There’s a list of apps that work and those that don’t work. Most banking apps should work though as the GrapheneOS passes Google SafetyNet checks.
NFC payments still seem to be an issue though as most banking apps rely on Google Pay for that?
The repos issue tracker is slightly more up to date.
There are some banking apps and apps in general that may be problematic. For such cases, here are the possible work around solutions.
Could you briefly explain what that is?
Edit: I did some research and apparently it’s a japanese mobile payment system that utilizes NFC. I found this on the GrapheneOS issue tracker, it seems to have been broken, but apparently it’s fixed now. Unfortunately I can’t try it out as I’m not from Japan. I also found this in the patch notes of a GrapheneOS version that was released in March of this year:
include PixelNfc app on all supported Pixels to enable support for FeliCa on Japanese Pixel models
Yeah yeah, GOS is cool and all but the only way to use it is to buy an expensive Pixel phone.
I looked at Graphene OS and I am interested, but how can I find out if it will run on my old Samsung Galaxy S7?
By looking at this page on their website. But I can also just tell you the answer: No, unfortunately it’s not supported. There are quite a few reasons for this. The Galaxy S7 is old and abandoned by Samsung, meaning it doesn’t receive kernel and firmware updates anymore. Even if it ran the newest release of Android, it would still lack important patches and potentially be insecure. There’s another reason why the GrapheneOS team decided to only support modern Google Pixel phones: Hardware security. Google pixel phones are equipped with what is known as a ‘secure element’ with their Titan M chips. These are tamper-resistant and can thus safely be used to store cryptographic keys and other secrets that are e.g. used for full-device encryption.
