Following up on a previous post regarding the plan I have to run a Google free Android phone and the fact that it’s impossible to run Bunq on such a phone currently I wanted to lay out a possibility for the future development of the Bunq Android app. As Bunq is about free and independent banking, I think an Android app that is not tied to Google and its services to function properly, would be a great extent to Bunq’s own values. From what I understood, Bunq uses Play Services and Google Cloud Messagig for functions like NFC, QR Code scanning and notifications. However, there are tons of open source projects and libraries available that can be used on the backend to achieve the same thing and not rely on Google for that. As for trust, Bunq could decide to make their app available outside the Play Store on their own website. Apps like WhatsApp and Signal use their own updater within the app, complete with notification and change log, without relying on Google. Both parties have made their app available on their website for users to download, so everybody knows that this app really comes from the vendor itself.
I’m not asking for Bunq to make their app open source or even FOSS, but I think that an app that doesn’t rely on Google to function properly and would be available to users outside the Play Store, for users with a fair phone for example, would connect really well to the core values of Bunq and would benefit a lot of users, me in particular ;)