Europe's sovereign digital ID needs Google's blessing to trust your phone
The EU wallet asks Google Play Integrity whether your phone is genuine. A GrapheneOS or e/OS device fails not because it's insecure, but because it isn't Google's — and Switzerland already showed there's another way.
The EU's digital identity wallet uses Google Play Integrity to vouch for a phone, which rejects de-Googled Android as untrusted. Switzerland uses Android's plain Hardware Attestation API instead; Italy and the Netherlands wired in Play Integrity unconditionally.
A Waag researcher argues that route breaches the Digital Markets Act. In the thread, the developer of the Fenrir protocol predicts nothing changes until an antitrust lawsuit lands.
The de-Googled phone that can't file your taxes
Waag researcher Danny Lämmerhirt makes a narrow but sharp claim in the article: the EU's digital identity wallets, meant to be an act of digital sovereignty, hand Google and Apple a lever over who gets to participate in public life. The work grew out of Mobifree, an EU-funded project that tested de-Googled Android ecosystems with 120 users.
The mechanism is Google Play Integrity. Before a wallet app trusts a phone, it asks Play Integrity to attest the device is genuine — and Play Integrity treats "genuine" as "runs a Google-licensed Android, signed in with a Google account, apps from the Play Store." A GrapheneOS or e/OS phone fails that check not because it is insecure but because it is not Google's. Lämmerhirt notes a cleaner option already exists: Android's Hardware Attestation API, which does hardware-backed security checks without enforcing Google's ecosystem rules. Switzerland uses it. Italy and the Netherlands wired in Play Integrity unconditionally instead. The EU's own Architecture Reference Framework only recommends the Google/Apple path rather than mandating it, so member states diverge, and the article argues the Play Integrity route runs straight into the Digital Markets Act.
The thread: this is a lawsuit waiting to happen
The most grounded voice belonged to a developer who had read the reference code. He pointed to the EU's own wallet repository requiring Play Services, and to Italy's IO app repeatedly rejecting GrapheneOS support requests.
"Nothing will change until the lawsuits start coming in. The only hope is the motorola/grapheneOS collaboration and consumer associations, that might sue for anticompetitive behavior." — the main developer of the Fenrir network protocol
That prediction has a German precedent. Courts there ordered Deutsche Bahn to keep selling offline tickets that need no smartphone, so as not to discriminate against the elderly, noted a freelance developer from Germany — and he expects the same reasoning to hit any wallet that requires Google or Apple.
A separate objection ran deeper than the Google-versus-Graphene fight: remote attestation itself is the problem.
"Any security feature which relies on remote attestation of the users entire platform is government overreach as it ultimately gives the government the power to choose what operating systems are acceptable." — a commenter arguing even hardware attestation is an attack on autonomy
His alternative: a purpose-built EU hardware token doing zero-knowledge age proofs, handed out free, so citizens need not own a smartphone at all. A high-karma commenter sketched a middle path. Make the physical EU ID card the attestation source, tapped against the phone for sensitive operations, which removes the trusted-hardware requirement from the device entirely.
One reader read the article more carefully than its title: it is really about Google Play, he observed, and lumps Apple in on thinner grounds. The counter that keeps the whole complaint from being academic is the ban-hammer scenario: if a Google account ban also revokes your legal identity, a wrongful copyright strike on a wedding video could, in principle, lock you out of filing taxes.
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