Any bank or neobank that supports open source culture?

Is there any bank openly promoting the use of FOSS?
Which maybe also means they will have solid support of “de-googled” smartphone OSes like Iode?
Would be nice in the long run, also for getting my children into (online) banking…

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What country are we talking about? I recently did extensive research (for german banks) and ended up very disappointed. No bank allows custom ROMs officially because they could held liable if your account gets compromised through the ROM.

Using a normal bank account + TAN generator + banking in the browser ended up being the only reliable way if you don’t wanna risk losing access to your account through a Google-, Banking-App- or ROM-Update. Afaict!

Atm I have an account at C24 (a neobank), I wasn’t able to log in via the app directly, because video-ident always pooped itself when ran from within the app. However, I contacted the support and was able to send them a picture with my face and ID and they remotely activated my App manually. I am using iodeOS 7.4 on the Fairphone 6 btw.

So it is really really unrealiable and I am about to move away from Neobanks because of that.

Hope that helps. :innocent:

Yes, for Germany there are no banks that I or my AI are aware of who support FOSS philosophy or - heaven forbid - provide their apps at F-Droid or in their own repository.

There simply are no profits in doing so, hence no offer.

I live in Austria, guess the situation is not be better here.
I was hoping that there might be some international project supporting FOSS at least a little bit… :melting_face:

It’s like asking to use some windows software on linux. Why use closed source central banks currency(with zero transparency and used to fund wars) when we can use real foss money with many options of foss wallets?

I think this thread is not about crypto, we have a separate topic for that.

Here, it is about (possibly foss) banking apps for traditional banking.

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Indeed, sorry for my undesired answer.

I also think there are no banks with FOSS philosophy. That seems to be mutually exclusive.

As far as the app compatibility goes - I haven’t had a bank in Germany yet where the app did NOT work with iode.

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Any idea if one of the so called ethical banks has publicly supported the open source idea?

Perhaps this is not exactly what you ask for but it looks like it is related. I found it on the website of the German GLS-Bank:

Their banking app is not open source but it works well with iodeOS. I think this is related to this post

Not sure if it goes in the FOSS direction but NEON in Switzerland used to work on Huawei App Gallery

Goes into de direction of degoogled but not what we might be looking for…

The ‘install on app gallery’ button is gone meanwhile on the site

Triodos Bank (so called ethical-banking) app works in Iodé. But I am not aware whether they officially support FOSS philosophy. I suppose they don’t, since their app is not in F-Droid.

I’d even be okay with a proprietary app, as long as they don’t force me to get it from either Apple Store or Google Play Store.

There is no reason for this AT ALL.
Banks could make the app available on their website and the app could update itself like so many other apps do nowadays. So customers would always be patched up and safe.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Even with a code for activation to avoid phishing. I always take Threema as an example: Pay (even cash if you wish) for the license code. Download the app from their website. Use the code to set up the app. Why can’t I use a TAN for installation/activation?

Conclusion: It is not in the bank’s interest to disrupt Google’s/Apples dominance and giving freedom of choice to their customers. Ask where the money is …

No doubt their websites as well are infested with Google (or other) trackers.

I had always thought this way too: why don’t they host their apps by themselves, instead of forcing their customers to also be goo’s customers / products? There must be some mutual interest there. Actually, I think the public authorities should enforce options out of this jail.

I guess for the moment our only chance is to keep using solutions like Aurora store. ¿Or is something else out there?

On the UK Triodos Internet Banking site uBlock Origin reports zero trackers, and only three trackers - none of them anything to do with Google - on the main home page.

Similar story on the UK Nationwide Banking site: a couple more trackesr blocked, bit nothing from Google

UK Smile bank has 7, including Cloudfront, which is a CDN, not collecting data, and - again - nothing from Google.

So clearly not ‘infested’ :smiley:

EDIT:

All three sites and their Android apps work fine under LineageOS for microG and iodéOS).

The banks mentioned above seem to do what you think they should, and don;t appear to have anything to do with Google. But why let a few facts get in the way of some good, old-fashioned paranoia and FUD? :wink:

I am happy to know those facts :slight_smile:.
Inspired by them, I have consulted Exodus about some big (traditional) banks in Spain:

  • CaixaBank: 7 trackers, including Google, Facebook, Adobe, … and particularly high number of permissions required.
  • Banco Santander: 8 trackers, Google, Adobe, Sentry, …
  • BBVA: 5 trackers
  • ING: 6 trackers

Most of them are reported (in Aurora) to work with MicroG with limitations.

Also:

  • N26: 7 trackers, Google amd others
  • Revolut: 3 trackers, Google amd AppsFlyer, and a lot of permissions required.

In comparison, Triodos Bank (Spain): 3 trackers, all of them by Google (seems the UK branch is better, to this respect). And the fewest permissions (possibly partially due to the little functionality used by the application).

I am not able to distinguish which trackers are more or less malicious.

I didn’t use Exodus, only looked at what URLs are blocked by uBlock Origin.

Looking at Exodus, Nationwide and Smile both use Firebase Analytics, and Adobe Experience. As I understand it, these packages share data with the App developer, not with Google. I would be very surprised to hear that Google accesses any information from hem: they ar under so mch scrutiny - in EU particularly - that I don’t believe they would risk keeping or using such data that users have not agreed to.

Triodos UK uses only Bugsnag - nothing from Google or Adobe

Also german Postbank. Not open source , but it works under iode.

Interesting discussion, thank you!
Seems a bank supporting FOSS really is not a thing, but lets say: not yet!

Anyway, maybe we should have a thread with a collection of banking apps that work on Iode?
I can confirm the following Austrian banking apps working:

  • Bawag
  • Raiffeisen Kasse
  • George (Sparkasse)