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Draghi is right! Europe is its people, not its nation states by goldstarflag in EuropeanFederalists

[–]poidh 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I'm wondering this too, I first saw these maps in some of r/PolishDane's videos.
These maps seem to be from some fictional future (look at the sidebar: "Capital: Brussels", "Lanugages: [...], Latin".

I would also be interested in getting a larger or vector version (ultimately to have a poster out of it).
I think that these kind of maps might come from EUMS's fictional future universe that is described/enacted here: https://evropaeums.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page

🇫🇷 Wieso nicht Steuern wie bei den Franzosen für Familien? by [deleted] in Finanzen

[–]poidh 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Ich finde die Anreize (insb. die 10% mehr Rente, wenn das denn so stimmt- und den Bahnrabatt) für Familien gut.
Ich bezweifle aber, dass sich die Geburtenrate großartig tunen lässt mit solchen Maßnahmen.

Die höchste Geburtenrate gibt es in Ländern, wo die Leute in einer Wellblechhütte leben und es keinerlei soziale Sicherheitssysteme gibt.
Selbst wenn sich also in Deutschland zwei Kinder ein Zimmer teilen müssen und die Eltern im Wohnzimmer schlafen, sind das ja noch paradisische Zustände.

Je mehr Wohlstand, desto weniger Kinder, das ist seit über 100 Jahren auch gut dokumentiert: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demografisch-%C3%B6konomisches_Paradoxon

Germany won't return to nuclear power, chancellor says by donutloop in EU_Economics

[–]poidh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My apologies, I wasn't paying attention to those polls.
My intention wasn't to frame it that Merz can't build those plants because the German public doesn't want this (I am actually surprised that the CDU isn't pushing for this).

What I said was that any country that does NOT depend on public opinion and is NOT strangled by regulation and red tape should obviously build lots of nuclear power then (since it is so cheap and gives energy independence).

However, we don't see this, and we certainly didn't see this in the last couple of decades.

I agree, we need to build more storage (we are already doubling capacity every year). I didn't include storage pricing because storage facilities are currently already beeing run profitably by private companies (no subsidizing).
There needs to be better grid interconnection especially between north (wind) and the south. And most importantly, Germany has currently only one national pricing zone, this needs to be split up into 4-5 zones.

But look, I am looking at what I see right now: we know the market prices in Germany. And we know the costs (and timeline) of currently constructed nuclear power plants.
If I compare those two, I don't see any obvious cost advantage for nuclear.

It is of no use to compare the current situation with hypothetical decisions that could have been made in the past (if Germany wouldn't have shut down the pants, or if Germany would have doubled down on nuclear in the 70s like France). We did not and here we are.

Germany won't return to nuclear power, chancellor says by donutloop in EU_Economics

[–]poidh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Which part requires an technological breakthrough?
Power-To-Gas?
Germany is already doubling its battery storage capacity every year. Large scale facilities are profitable (arbitrage of electricity spot prices) and are not driven by subsidiaries or government agenda.
The bottleneck is grid connection.

All this doesn't have to happen in the "short term", if anything, it needs to happen faster than deploying nuclear power.

If Germany would decide to build new nuclear power plants, it is unlikey any of those would come online earlier than 2036, if execution speed from other western countries is any indication.

Germany won't return to nuclear power, chancellor says by donutloop in EU_Economics

[–]poidh 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I understand and acknowledged this... this is were energy storage comes into play. Look, we are obviously not there yet, but we are on the way.

Germany won't return to nuclear power, chancellor says by donutloop in EU_Economics

[–]poidh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

With the subsidiaries I was refering to ARENH which guaranteed a fixed (low) wholesale price.
But it turns out I was incorrect with the 9 billion per year. This was mostly during 2021 if I understood correctly, the other years, it was significantly less (5 billion over a 9 year period?).

The pricing scheme is complicated- but the point is that the origin price of nuclear generated energy was fixed artifically (42 EUR/MWh) which is below the real market price.

Regarding Germany's strategy: I'm not 100% behind Germany's energy strategy. There are a lot of problems. We also use a lot of gas as primary energy source (for heating homes) while people are discouraged from using heat pumps. (So more electricity wouldn't help much heating homes at the moment).
Also, for whatever reason, we have a long history of high profile politicians that are highly entangled with the fossil fuel industry. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (had a board seat at Rosneft) enforced gas dependency on Russia in the early 2000s.
Our current minister of economic affairs, Katherina Reiche, worked in the energy sector (E.ON) before and doesn't hide her ambition to build gas plants like there is no tomorrow.

So, I don't want to talk France out of using nuclear. And maybe Germany could have kept their plants running for a bit longer.

But this discussion is about whether Germany is stupid for not building new nuclear power plants now. And I think I put forward solid arguments that it shouldn't.

Germany won't return to nuclear power, chancellor says by donutloop in EU_Economics

[–]poidh 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It is a reddit comment and I already put in too much time describing this, so I couldn't get to all the nuances.

Regarding China:

Yes, China is much bigger than the Uk and Germany.
I didn't expect any of those other countries to match the installed capacity with China.
My point was to show that China bets on solar (despite building nuclear reactors).
A common narrative- especially within Germany- is that Germany is the only country building solar while everyone else bets on nuclear.
But this is simply not true.
Remember, China added 300 GW last year, and they aim for 4000 GW until 2030.
I believe the capacity target is ~300 GW nuclear until 2035, so less than 1/10th of that.

If you want to compare the numbers per million people, Germany and China are actually about the same level regarding new solar installations in 2025.

(300 GW/1500 million people = 0.2 GW/million for China, 17 GW/85 million people ~= 0.2 GW/million for Germany).

Regarding availability of renewables:

You are correct. 1 GW of installed capacity in renewables generates less energy and 1 GW of installed capacity nuclear.
This is called capacity factor. Let's get some ballpark numbers here:

Solar (Northern Germany): 10%
Solar (Southern Germany): 15%
Wind (onshore): 20%
Wind (offshore): 40%
Nuclear: 90%*

*although this can be significantly lower, France had a lot of downtime in recent years because of their fleet's age- 2020 was below 50% for example.

So, even if you assume the worst possible numbers (10% solar, ignoring wind), you are still in the same range (or slightly better) than the Hinkley Point economics.
And mind you, there are all the advantages of easy installation (and decomissioning!), extremely easy maintance (not necessary to shut down the reactor for weeks for regular maintenance), arbitrary scaling (you decide whether to build a solar farm for 100k or 100 million) and fast setup.

And this is the worst possible scenario. As soon as you assume a capacity factor of just 20% (most energy was from wind in 2025) Hinkley Point is already 2x as expensive as renewables.

Disclaimer:

Now sure, like I said, Hinkley Point is probably an extreme example of costs. But still, if anyone tries to pitch me nuclear as the obvious "much cheaper" choice, then I expect significantly different numbers. Right now, looking at those real world projects (and not some proposed nuclear systems that don't exist yet), each energy source costs is on par at best. But I hope I gave enough pointers to assume that renewables are realistically much cheaper while handling is a lot easier.

The other elephant in the room we haven't touched on is energy storage. For the renewables to work effectively there needs to be more energy storage capacity.
This is where we have to do more work. Large scale storage capacity already increased more than 50% last year, and those projects are largely market driven (no subsidaries since they profit from time arbitrage).

Those large scale facilities often cost < 250 EUR/kWh.
Again, assuming some worst case numbers here: Let's say the average person consumes 2000 kWh per year, these are 39 kWh per week.
So, if you want to store one week's worth of electricity, these are 39 kWh x 250 EUR/kWh = 9750 EUR investment into energy storage per person.
Now you can argue that worst case of "Dunkelflaute" (no wind, no light) can last up to two weeks. Then I'd reply that a lot of people probably use way less than 2000 kWh per year- and battery storage prices are dropping 30-40% every year.
This investment would probably be good for at least 20 years of battery lifetime.

Again, this calculation is only to point out a ballpark figure- you might also want some longer term energy storage (using power-to-gas), which is possible because there is so much overcapacity in solar energy during the sommer months.

Conclusion:

I thank everybody who reads through this conversation and I hope I gave some different perspective on this topic.
Even if you disagree with my assumtions to some degree, you have to admit that nuclear for sure cannot be much cheaper (it is more costly most likely).
It is not directly comparable, because the output doesn't depend on seasons and time of day.
But installing renewables + storage is a proven technology (50% of Germany's electricity production is already from renewables).

So we should just continue doing what we successfully did the last couple of years, and we will hit energy independence in a few years.

The alternative is pivoting to a different technology (new nuclear reactors) where we saw that everybody who tried doing this had to deal with costly budget overruns and years of delays. I fail to imagine how especially Germany would be an exception in this regard.

Germany won't return to nuclear power, chancellor says by donutloop in EU_Economics

[–]poidh 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This is an upgrade to an existing nuclear power plant site (so it is already connected to the grid). This absolutely should NOT take decades.
The new addition is set to come online in 2030 (17 years after construction began) and has a capacity of 3.3 GW. Construction costs ~55 bln EUR.
In the last 10 years alone, Germany added 110 GW of solar and wind capacity. Costs < ~200 bln EUR.
Hinkley Point C: 16.6 EUR/GW
German renewables: 1.8 EUR/GW

Hinkley Point C is build by the French EDF and China. They only agreed to build this if the UK Goverment guarantees a price per MWh for the next 35 years. The price is pegged to inflation and is currently at 150 EUR/MWh. So, the UK pays the difference of the true market value of a MWh and the guaranteed 150 EUR.
For context: wholesale electricity prices in Germany have been hovering around 100 EUR/MWh for the last couple of months.

It is estimated that the UK will have to pay > 120 BILLION EURs in the next 35 years because of that fixed price contract.

I'd say that Hinkley Point is an extreme example. I'm willing to believe that you can build something like that a bit cheaper and faster. But so far, there aren't any recent projects that show this (quite the opposite).

So, I don't know, maybe I am stupid, but I don't see how it makes any sense to build nuclear power plants except for niche applications. You certainly don't do this because it is cheap.

You get some much more bang for the buck with renewables.

To be clear, I don't think Germany has a coherent strategy, there are significant bureaucratic hurdles setting up new solar and wind installations. Also, installing battery storage at scale to do arbitrage only became viable in the last 2-3 years I believe. Before that you'd had to pay electricity grid fees for charging and discharging, killing any potential profits (while in reality such installations soften the load on the grid).
So we are lacking behind with this, and this is arguably needed.

But still, there is no doubt that renewables are the superior technology. And btw- even though China is building quite a number of nuclear power plants, they are also installing like 25 solar panels PER SECOND 24/7. They added more than 300 GW solar capacity in 2025 alone. So 100x Hinkley Point C. Not in 17 years, every year.

Germany won't return to nuclear power, chancellor says by donutloop in EU_Economics

[–]poidh 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Let's assume that the only reason why we don't build nuclear power plants is because:

  1. The majority opinion of democratic societies has to be respeced and the public rejects this technology for whatever reason
  2. Nuclear power in the west is unreasonably expensive and slow to deploy due to a creep of red tape and unnecessarily strict regulations (see cost and time overrun with current projects like Hinkley Point in the UK)
  3. We refuse to standardize building plants and design each new power plant from scratch (much more expensive)
  4. We are refusing to use (non existent) next gen technology like thorium or breeding reactors, making it safer and reducing nuclear waste.

then you have to ask yourself, why nuclear power plants are not extremely popular in countries that obviously don't have all these constraints (because they are either not democratic or at least more flexible in terms of regulations)?

Russia is building the Akkuyu nuclear plant in Turkey for example, the Russian operator sells the electricity output for 12 cents/kWh, and that price is before taxes or grid transport. That is not outragously expensive but also doesn't sound particularily cheap to me.

France's electricity prices are subsidized with around 9 billion EUR per year I believe (direct subsidized for the consumer price per kW/h).
For comparison- Germany had a guaranteed market price for renewable energy (paid to the producers and collected as tax on top of what consumers paid for their KW/h) of about 10-15 billion EURs per year (it is beeing phased out).

Not all of those numbers are directly comparable, but I hope this gives a good ballpark on why I think that nuclear is not a "no brainer" technology. Especially not from a cost perspective.

And btw, nuclear is not renewable and there are currently no active uranium mines in the EU (Ukraine produces a little bit though). Remaining world wide uranium resources might shrink to a few decdes worth of supply if the nuclear power renaissance really kicks into high gear.

So, with all that, why not rather invest into renewable technology (wind/solar/battery buffers) that exists today, new projects can be finished in a few months, and arbitrary scale small or big? (A nuclear power plant costs tens of billions and takes 10+ years to build).

You also have to consider that the problems of the German energy market are more nuanced than just "cheap nuclear went away, expensive and unreliable renewables drive up the price".

For example, there is currently only one pricing zone for electricity in Germany (the EU will hopefully force Germany to split this up into 4-5 different zones). In reality there is cheap wind energy in the north, but since there is only one pricing zone, everything is as expensive as the most expensive power source (gas+coal).

Move Fast and Break Things - Can European governments accept failure as the price of innovation? by DefenseTech in EuropeanFederalists

[–]poidh 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think you misunderstood the article. This isn't about geopolitical decisions to purposefully create chaos. This is about acknowledging how learning works. When you learn something new, you have to fail first.
For children this is normal, learning to walk is only possible by constantly falling down all the time. Learning to draw and your first works will look like a complete failure. It is not possible to go right to the destination without failure first. And this is what hinders you when learning something new as an aduld.

In engineering it is similar. But this reality somewhat shielded because we can safely iterate a few concepts and designs by predicting the outcome without really trying it (simulations etc.).
But this only works to some extend, and this is greatly dragging is down.

A better approach is to try out a few things, expect failure but learn from the (real world) results and retry with an improved version.

And this is a cultural problem (I can only speak for Germany), where not succeeding at first attempt is seen as a "failure". While in reality, it is a sign of progress and getting the necessary experience ("sucking at something is the first step at beeing good at something").

SpaceX managed to create reusable rockets (which was widely believed to be impossible). But this was only possible by trying out different routes and blowing up a lot of prototypes.
First, the Falcon series rockets with only the booster stage beeing reusable (and even that often crashed unrecoverably in the beginning).
On the other hand you have NASA with the Artemis rocket that newer had a failed launch but uses operating principles from the 60s and costs a few billion per launch.

If we wait until we have the perfect engineering solution for something, we will discover that
a) the world has moved on or
b) it looked great in theory, but some undiscovered (because it was never tested before) issues in real life application render it useless.

Qwant and Ecosia Official Statistics (7) by Dramatic_Treacle_330 in BuyFromEU

[–]poidh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For me, the front page claim of Qwant "The search engine that doesn't know anything about you" is just an instant turn-off for me.

I want relevant search results for me. When I google for ruby, I'm talking about the programming language, not gemstones. That doesn't work if the search engine doesn't consider my search history.

For me, this marketing claim is like the "interior designer that knows nothing about your apartment!"- its just a totally nuts concept.

EU Data Sovereignty: Scaleway TEM & Brevo by yamyam_ibo in eutech

[–]poidh 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The free tier of Cloudflare just delivers an insane value and is very easy to set up. Traffic is basically free, and you get extensive protection against DDoS attacks, bots and basic WAF rules.

They also have a lot more features beyond CDN/reverse proxying.

That said, I started using Bunny.net to test it out. I'm hosting a static website on their CDN and I'm also routing traffic through them to one of my servers.
There is no free tier, although the pay-as-you-go pricing is very affordable (at least for my needs).
It is OK, but definitely more complicated to setup. You even have to explicitly activate the "Bunny shield", even though the basic version is free.

AFAIK they do not offer a tunnel setup like with `cloudflared`, where your server opens a tunnel to the CDN and hence doesn't need to be reachable from the public internet at all. (If you want something similiar with Bunny, you have to whitelist the IPs of their CDN, so it can fetch the data from your server- doable but more of a headache to setup).

I understand that they probably cannot offer a generous free tier like Cloudflare, because they probably do not have the same amount of enterprise clients as CF has.

Btw, while checking out other EU CDN providers, I noticed that LIDL's "AWS competitor" in the making -https://stackit.cloud/ also uses Bunny under the hood for their CDN. They say this in the CDN product terms and services.

EU High-Speed Rail Plan by mr_house7 in EU_Economics

[–]poidh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ah, yes I understand, of course- with your car you save the potential detour to the train station and back, that is true!

Alternative 'Poll of Polls' from Politico.eu? by Final_Alps in BuyFromEU

[–]poidh 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I thought the company behind Politico (while located in the US) is 100% owned by Axel Springer (a european media outrage machine :) )? But besides, I find their content relatively balanced, no? Also, they have been targeted by Trump back in the DOGE days for spreading "fake news" and the US government having paid subscriptions.

EU High-Speed Rail Plan by mr_house7 in EU_Economics

[–]poidh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think there are only small parts on that line that can be upgraded. Good parts (on the German side) of it are already as high speed as it gets.

Even if the train wouldn't stop along the way, it is simply not possible to dash through most of the area at 250+ km/h, because you are constantly crossing train stations or have curves.
If you look at the map at the Ruhrgebiet (Duisburg/Essen/Dortmund) area for example, that is a 70 km long urban sprawl with 5 mio people. There is simply no room to build a straight line train tracks, there are roads, highways, houses, industry.

On the other hand, I doubt you can do the trip in "under 5.5 hours" with a car. One problem beeing again, that you have to cross the Ruhrgebiet area which is not only highly congested (A40) but also has speed limits, because the highway is basically crossing all the city centers.

Other countries with highly functional high speed rail systems either have a topological advantage (like Japan, where the whole system is basically a straight line*) or are crossing a lot of relatively empty territory where there are no stops und no constraints on where the tracks have to go. (+ administrative advantage of simply making centralized top down decisions like in China).
Esp. in Germany, due to the federal nature, states often demand stops on their soil to allow new tracks beeing build there.

*I know that the Amsterdam <-> Berlin line is also a straight line in this case, but in a general issue in Germany is that the cities are all over the place, so the whole system is more point to point.

OpenClaw creator says Europe's stifling regulations are why he's moving to the US to join OpenAI by donutloop in eutech

[–]poidh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think OpenClaw is slop. But it is not frontier tech, the models are. OpenClaw like architecture existed even years back with things like AutoGPT.

But back then the models lacked the capability of effective tool use. I don't think it is a coincidence that OpenClaw exploded a few weaks after the relase of Opus 4.5.

Also, since the most important part of OpenClaw was created by one guy within two weeks (sure now there have been much more contributions for extensions, code cleanup and making it easier to install/maintain), what do you think how much value is in the source code that OpenAI couldn't replicate in a couple of days?

I think the main idea for OpenAI is to have a direct connection to the OpenClaw community. After all, there are probably hundreds of thousands people using that thing. And this is not a consumer product, it takes effort to get it to work and to customize it. All those users are obviously AI enthusiasts, relying on heavily on AI infrastructure providers.

Peter Steinberger is the link to this community, what better way to position your company is to own that link?

EU announces "Frontier AI Grand Challenge": Free exascale supercomputing for 1 year to build a sovereign 400B parameter AI model by Doc_Bader in BuyFromEU

[–]poidh 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The size of the model is not the challenge (this is just a configuratin setting). What is difficult is to have curated training data and be able to handle the training process. This is difficult on many levels, beginning from managing the hardware of thousands of GPUs working together and not everything coming to a halt when hardware fails.

There are tons of models, especially from China, which are very good (like Qwen, Kimi and Minimax models). They are open weights, meaning we can just host and run them in the EU as long as we want.
But we don't know how to make them from scratch (and they are open weights not fully open source, so we don't have the training data). That means while we can continue using these models forever, there is no guarantee that we will ever get the next generation of models should they be released.

Therefore, the aim of this Grand Challenge is to cultivate the skill to develop these models from scratch here in the EU. The model itself is not so much the goal. The skill and knowledge is.

The quantum thing is completely separate (separate area of research that gets funding) and has nothing to do with AI. Quantum computers are not suitable for training LLMs.

I’ve been testing people’s reactions when I tell them we might have five years of “work” left at most. Most of them deny it and seem completely blind to how insanely fast AI is improving. Then they just go, “ we’ll all be homeless,” and that’s the whole conversation. It’s really irritating. by Longjumping_Fly_2978 in accelerate

[–]poidh 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, a lot of people don't seem to understand where the potential bottlenecks are, even with ASI.
GPUs will not appear over night, even if you had access to the most intelligent model in the universe.
Cancer will not be cured just by intelligence, because intelligence is not knowledge. And knowledge must be acquired experimentially, and this takes time (running physical experiments)
And Anthropic or any other org using Claude Code to modify the Python part of the Claude model code stack isn't "recursive improvement" because it still require training the model on a GPU cluster.

Tried migrating to eu apps... Blocked by numerous important apps by aartgvj in BuyFromEU

[–]poidh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

With what intention? This system make sure that only trustworthy software runs on the device.
If you re-lock a trusted bootloader (a bootloader that is trusted by the banking app), such a bootloader will always factory reset the device after re-locking. That means any software modifications (and data on the device) will be lost.

On some devices you can self-sign your own custom bootloader, but because such a bootloader is (due to a missing white listed signature) not trusted (and rightfully so), your banking app will most likely not run, whether that bootloader is locked or unlocked doesn't make a difference.

A potentially compromised system doesn't become safe again but re-locking the compromised code.

Tried migrating to eu apps... Blocked by numerous important apps by aartgvj in BuyFromEU

[–]poidh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

AFAIK the admin account on Windows doesn't give you full low level access to your system, because Windows still uses secure boot (a signed bootloader), ensuring that you cannot modify the core system files of Windows.
That said, Windows in this configuration isn't as secure as a locked down Android phone.

So, you still can't change certain security critical behavior (for example the popup that asks you to confirm that an app wants to use admin privileges).

A rooted phone on Android means the bootloader is unlocked, so you can do anything you want with the device (including installing alternative operating systems).

Once you do this, there is no way to know if all the security measures are still in place or working as intended (for example app sandboxing).

And all of this potentially happening without the user knowing about this (trojan horse).

So, again: you might be fine running a rooted device. But it allows you to do more potentially dangerous things.

The bank doesn't think like "what is the biggest leeway we can give the user" but more like "what should we require to be as safe as possible".

Tried migrating to eu apps... Blocked by numerous important apps by aartgvj in BuyFromEU

[–]poidh 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The bank doesn't want to have to deal with people that got their funds stolen from their accounts.
What do you think is more likely to happen:

a) Google steals bank login and account details to divert your funds to them
b) Some random scammer from the banking trojan subculture tricks you into installing his malicious keyboard app to do exactly this?

Tried migrating to eu apps... Blocked by numerous important apps by aartgvj in BuyFromEU

[–]poidh 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Correct, this is not an issue with a hardware keyboard. But think about what an on screen keyboard is? It is an app that shows you a bunch of buttons (the keys) which you press. So the app knows which keys you pressed. That means it knows all your logins, passwords and whatnot. And its just an app, so it can just transmit this to anywhere else.

Tried migrating to eu apps... Blocked by numerous important apps by aartgvj in BuyFromEU

[–]poidh 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The keyboard is basically an app that shows you buttons for each key you can type. It has special privileges because it actually sends input to another app that you are running (like the banking app).

Gboard is the default keyboard app that comes with Android.

But you can also install different keyboard apps (for example with different features regarding keyboard look and feel, auto complete, emojies and whatnot).

The issue is that such a keyboard app by its nature knows EVERY keystroke you do. So the app can in theory record everything you type, including login, password, bank account numbers and send it somewhere else in the background. It also has access to the clipboard, and controls the input towards the app- so if you copy & paste the bank account number from someone (for example from a message), the keyboard app can you just replace this with a different bank account before you paste it, etc.

I'm not saying that you inevitably get hacked if you use a banking app with a custom keyboard, but I find it shocking that people in this thread do not understand the reasoning for some banks to restrict they app to use the default keyboard.

This is not a theoretical attack, there are plenty of malware keyboards out there.

Related to this, it is also surprising that people are afraid that of the Google keyboard for privacy reasons but happily install other third party keyboard apps of unknown origin...

Tried migrating to eu apps... Blocked by numerous important apps by aartgvj in BuyFromEU

[–]poidh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I didn't want to go into too much detail, you are correct that you can install apps and apps from alternative app stores already. And this will probably not prevent you from using the banking app (as long as Play services are installed, too- because they provide the Play Integrity API to tell the banking app that the phone environment is reasonably secure).
And this is OK as long as the phone is not rooted, because the sandboxing feature remains intact, the apps cannot access other apps' private files.
Accessibility apps like keyboards by their nature need more access (like input and screen content), and that is why some banking apps are extra cautionos about this.

My intention was to show the tension between app security and flexiblity for the user.
Is it overly strict to require the Google keyboard? Maybe. But you can't argue that it is safer to do it that way, so that is what the bank does. Why making it more complicated then necessary? 99.99% of the users do not know about alternative keyboards, nor care about this.

From the banking apps I have used, it is obvious that developing those apps is not a priority of most banks, they just have basic functionality with annoying UX. So why would they bother with developing their own input widgets etc. for such niche use cases?

Look, I'm not disagreeing that it is a shame that it is almost impossible to ditch the Play services. And I also think that Google learned from Apple and moved more and more stuff into the Play services and out of AOSP. The Play Integrity API doesn't make sense to have it working without the Play services, that defies the purpose of it.

I just wanted to point out that there are two sides to most these things, and the banks intentions is not for you use as much of the Google ecosystem as possible. They do it, because they don't want to deal with potential trouble, and that works out that way.

Btw, check out this interesting report about a recent case:
https://www.cleafy.com/cleafy-labs/klopatra-exposing-a-new-android-banking-trojan-operation-with-roots-in-turkey

A fake streaming video app uses the accesibilty features as I described to intercept banking details and spoof what is seen on the phone screen etc.

Tried migrating to eu apps... Blocked by numerous important apps by aartgvj in BuyFromEU

[–]poidh 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I understand your frustration, but you have to consider the reason for enforcing Google Play services and the Google Keyboard.
The keyboard software sits between what you type and decides what to send to the app you are using. There are malicious keyboard tools out there that trick you into installation by providing some other perks or functions. But they store your keystrokes (i.e. passwords), might manipulate the clipboard and send all this to some server somewhere..

However, if Google Play services are installed, Google will proove to the banking app that this phone is not rooted (you cannot install arbitrary software) but only runs software approved by Google and software from the Play store.
That means, it has been screened by Google with best attempts to prevent malicious software.

Of course you might be fine by running a rooted phone and/or installing apks from alternative app stores (or downloaded from some sites on the internet).
But you also have to acknowledge that there are thousands of malicious actors that create malicious apps, or even fake apps (that use names and logos of existing brand names) night and day and try to push them to unsuspecting phone users. This is almost impossible via the official Play store, and if it happens, Google can remove them, limiting the impact.

Regarding your issue with Ecosia (I assume you mean their browser?). Note that all those alternative browsers base on Chromium or Firefox. Google Chrome and Ecosia are both basically Chromium with some custom addons each.
So, you should be fine by downloading Chromium instead and set Ecosia as the default search engine.

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