Supporting mainstream OEM variants can already be enough of a nightmare in behavioural differences. What motivation do most companies have to support Graphene, which will be a handful of customers at best? Developers may be fine with offering a best effort support model, but legal certainly wouldn't.

That's a starting point, but it seems the VW app is using a Google SDK for integrity checks, so maybe we need certain SDKs to be banned.

The app worked without issues until a few weeks ago. I used it for a year. It was not broken. GrapheneOS is just AOSP Android, optionally with Google Play Services.

My take is that they were trying to block rooted phones and/or custom ROMs of questionable origin and GrapheneOS just became collateral damage because all these companies do go the minimal route of using Play Integrity. GrapheneOS supports remote attestation through AOSP APIs, in fact, they have a page about it.

I think it's worth letting this be heard. GrapheneOS has > 400,000 users and is rapidly growing. Breaking things is not going to affect 5 people anymore, but thousands, ten thousands or hundreds of thousands, depending on what the app is.

They don't need to do anything to support GrapheneOS. They only need to stop actively going out of the way to block it and any other alternative OS via the Play Integrity API. They put significant effort into blocking anything other than iOS or a Google Mobile Services Android stock OS certified by Google. They're not only blocking a non-stock AOSP-based operating system but rather anything other than iOS or a Google Mobile Services Android device certified by Google.

GrapheneOS maintains 99% android app compatibility. It does not require any additional funding or expenses to support GrapheneOS, and is actually more expensive to add these anticompetitive tools responsible for banning GrapheneOS.

GrapheneOS is also not responsible for bugs in this app. Any bug reports coming from GOS are likely to be from the hardening toggles, which uncover bugs in the app. This is the apps fault, and these bugs still exist on other OSs. It should be resolved for the benefit of all users.

Its not a different os though. Its still android. VW seems to just have turned on integrity checks which constantly cause issues for non-google androids. Plenty of banks do the same.

> expensive to support

"Support" is such an overloaded and vague word in the software industry. What does it mean for a company to "support" an app/os configuration?

1. They deliberately target that app/os configuration, QA tests it, and answer customer support requests about it.

2. They target the configuration, QA tests it, but it's offered without customer support.

3. They target the configuration, but only release an untested build, use at your own risk.

4. They don't target the configuration at all, but the builds they do release happen to work on the configuration, totally unacknowledged by the company.

5. They don't target the configuration, and deliberately sabotage their application such that un-targeted configurations are actively blocked. Only adversarial users who hack the software are able to use it.

Too many companies say: "We can't do 1 because we don't 'support' it, therefore we must do 5!"

> If 97% of your users are on mainstream OSes, and the rest also account for disproportionately high numbers of bug reports, why should they bother supporting alternatives?

Because of those bug reports, very few may be specific to the non-mainstream OS? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28978086

The app worked until a few weeks ago. GrapheneOS does not miss any functionality (nor security) for the app to work. The only change is that they started blocking non-GMS Android through the thoroughly anti-competitive Play Integrity.

Hypothetically, if GrapheneOS wanted to become a certified Android, it would probably not be blocked on technical reasons, only that becoming certified (last time a contract was leaked) requires running privileged Google Play Services (which is less secure) and pre-installing a bunch of Google apps that should not be uninstallable.

How is that not anti-competitive?

The issue here is not that they didn't test on alternative distributions of Android, the issue is that they went out of their way to prevent anything but the officially blessed distributions.

The basis of your argument, that users want these developers to support another platform, does not make sense, because GrapheneOS does not require apps add explicit support for it. GrapheneOS has 99% android app compatibility.

The issue is not that this application isnt tested on GOS, its that an anticompetitive, illegal tool is being used to ban non-certified OSs when these apps would work perfectly otherwise.

This is one of the most ignorant comment I ever read on Hacker News. Are you from VW?

Obviously VW broke the app for GrapheneOS (or any other custom ROM) on purpose, and ironically, things usually works fine for custom ROMs than some Chinese OEM customized ROMs, and when it works, it means the developer went extra miles to implement workaround to cater the flawed OS.[1]

[1]: ref: Years of Android community experience

Here it is, the true hacker mentality.

Increasingly these kinds of apps are a requirement for a lot of features so ...

Sure the app is not required, though one loses on all of the remote-control functionality (remote start, remote climate control, etc.).

Maybe then app developers should be mandated to open fully their server-side protocols, so people can create apps for platforms that are not supported by default. No more undocumented APIs, anybody can get an API key, no API serving limits!

"tEsT yOuR PlatTfORM"

Fuck that.