No. It's still required by law, which means that your desktop application will require some interaction with your smartphone.
One day, there will be a knock on your door.
"Good morning, this is the police. Is there something wrong with your phone? Is your phone broken? Can we provide you with a charge?"
"No, I must have turned it off accidentally."
"Can we assist you with an upgrade? The newer models don't have power buttons."
Why wouldn't that be sufficient?
If the actual implementations do copy the dependency on Play Integrity and other such APIs, that does become a problem (getting past that is a major annoyance on amd64 computers because there are so few real amd64 Android devices that can be spoofed).
However, the law regarding these apps specifically states that the use of this app must be optional. I'm not sure websites and services will implement other solutions, but in theory you should not need a phone unless you want the convenience and privacy factor of app verification. I expect alternatives (such as 1 cent payments with credit cards in your name) to stick around, at least until we get a better idea about how this thing will work out in practice.
Tell somebody you use your phone less than 10 minutes a day and look at their face change.
Every new secure government identification/authentication/verification thing will try to 'just' use Android/IOS, because 'everyone' has one those smartphones.
Edit: Sorry that reference was a deep cut, I was quoting the devs of that awful Diablo mobile game way back.
Wait a minute, while writing this comment, I realized that there was a guy who sort of packaged waydroid into flatpak-ish to run android apps in flatpak.
https://flathub.org/en/apps/net.newpipe.NewPipe
(It uses android translation layer??)
I am not an EU citizen but if somebody is & they want this age verification app on desktop, maybe the best way might be to support this android translation layer to convert this EU app into something that can run through flatpak and then use linux I suppose.
I mean, some of y'all are so talented that I feel like surely someone would do it if things do go this way! So not too much to be worried about I suppose :>
Idk I created this just right now lol.
But on a serious note, Maybe check out my comment on something known as the android_translation_layer with flatpak to see if that might help to run that app atleast in linux.
Linking it here : >>45361397
I used to use the messaging app through SMS tho, the people that knew me (that 1 friend gets a shoutout here who used to msg me through SMS in the world of whatsapp and my mom!!)
Most phones are used for two things that my father used to quote: Whatsapp (messaging app) and youtube(social media)
Entertainment could somewhat be offloaded via music player etc. into dumb phones and to be really honest, I think that even things like hackernews could be operated on those dumb phones if given the ability to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdYrBpBJRI4 : this is the dumbphone which supports signal btw. Wish there was a way to make app for dumbphones like these just as how we can make apps for androids.
I was shocked by how much feature packed my chinese dumb phone was for 11.27$ lol. It just didn't have internet & yeah games as well.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Not only that, but having this locked behind something that works for 95% of users means the other 5% will never have enough leverage for any other implementations to be approved. Which is absolutely unacceptable for such an essential feature like age verification.
The target, which are the children who access "forbidden" websites without authorization is likely to be lower than amount of people who won't be able to access due to those narrow specs.
This is a general computing crisis.
Since children are universally not considered real people with real rights schools requiring them to have the right apps to perform their schoolwork are to be expected.
While not less than 10 minutes per day for me, but I was having this argument on reddit over the iPhone Air - people couldn't fathom that there's someone out there that is not on their phone 24/7, and doesn't use their phone as their main computing device.
I clock in at under an hour screen time most days. It's the least ergonomic device for me to do anything remotely serious. Can't even stand typing on a virtual keyboard. My laptop is, and will remain, my main interface to the net and communication with others.
You'd think I was some kind of weird hermit luddite because of it.
I see this as a huge stepback to be fair.
That requires an AppleID, i.e. an account with a foreign corporation.
Nobody is coding or writing anything longer than an email or social media post on a virtual keyboard.
The average screen time for younger people borders on 7 hours. It's almost a third of the day or 40% of the woken day for most people. I still can't wrap my head around how that can even be possible, but then I see in public most people you look at in any given moment are reading, watching or sending/sharing something.
If the conspiracy theorists are right, the tech industry created a surveillance system beyond their wildest dreams.
The EU wallet does use an open standard, and the wallet app itself is developed in public as open source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_the_Pussyfoot#Joyma...
"The remote-access computer transponder called the "joymaker" is your most valuable single possession in your new life. If you can imagine a combination of telephone, credit card, alarm clock, pocket bar, reference library, and full-time secretary, you will have sketched some of the functions provided by your joymaker."
Just about the only thing today that's meaningfully different from the novel is that our devices are smaller and have screens instead of using voice as the primary input/output method. Well, and they don't have a "medical" module that can dispense drugs (yet?).
Interestingly enough, in the setting of that book, possession of a joymaker is a marker of good standing, and lack of one (e.g. because one cannot afford to pay for service) basically makes one homeless and a target for all kinds of nastiness including from the cops.
Mother Russia: we'll take care about security, comrade, you just shut up and use a phone from this here list of approved models. And GrapheneOS? squinting suspiciously that's what extremists use to watch gay pornography; are you an extremist, then? No? Let's see if officer Rubber Hosesky here believes you...