I’m trying to move away from Google and other big tech corporations as much as I can without sacrificing practicality but it seems like the only way to make contactless payments is with stock android on a Google approved device.
Is there any alternative out there that would allow me to make contactless payments without these conditions met? (For example, if I put grapheneos on my phone)
Not that i am aware of. Our financial system is loaded with proprietary software. The only way i have found to fix it is to opt out as much as possible and use cryptocurrency which is what i have done
I love the idea of crypto as an actual currency but I think that’s probably never going to be widely accepted and stable
I suspect it will. We in the western world (US, Canada, UK, EU, etc) are used to very stable fiat currencies. Ask a person from Argentina, Turkey, etc if they would rather have their national currency or crypto and i bet a lot of them would take the crypto. A 10% fluctuation to them is a blessing to them because if they hold their currency they may drop 100% a year because of inflation.
I mean that’s great if those countries can benefit from it in that way, that’d be awesome to see
Not sure how that’s going to come to Western countries though especially with how resistant to positive change our society seems to be
Also not sure our government would ever do anything that benefits the people and hurts the banks
Edit: also they can just use other currencies that are more stable than their own anyway
I don’t think so. These are heavily regulated and that’s why Google Pay/Apple Pay is still not available in all countries after so many years.
So unless your bank allows that, which I doubt they’ll, Google Pay is probably the only way to do contactless payment the traditional way.
Unless your country/city has a widely accepted third party payment system that doesn’t go through the bank, like a digital wallet that you’ll have to top up its credit, then maybe.
I’m incline to say that there’s no way. I order to have secure payments you have to secure each and every step of the process. Without a big corporation under those steps no one in his right mind will gamble with payments
Would you consider samsung wallet big tech?
They are much smaller than google (user base wise)
I am not entirely sure it can be installed on non Samsung phones and non stock roms
Samsung, chaebol, is f-king huge.
man, I wish. my bank’s app used to have its own built-in contactless payment option (and it would even appear in Android’s “default apps” section as a payment handler!) but then they moved to Google Pay “due to a popular demand” :/
