They don’t take significantly more RAM

A lot of places don’t take cash.

My bank (Monzo) doesn’t even offer an alternative way to interact or sign up except through the smartphone app.

When I get a card I need to verify my identity somehow, times past that was me going to the bank, signing a form and showing my ID card. Fucking Tim Apple or Satya McGoogle didn’t have a role in that, why should they now?

The government did though in supplying said ID, so there was a centralised trustable organisation that the bank could depend on for verification.

One or more neutral organizations could exist certifying devices and operating systems without providing a centralized API. Those organizations could simply provide signed releases with the roots of trust, revoked keys and operating system key fingerprints. Apps could use multiple different certifying organizations. This is already something Android’s hardware attestation API fully supports today.

Then why doesn’t GrapheneOS offer that alternative to banks etc

You get yourself to BlueSky

I mean there’s gut feeling and then there’s real actual evidence.

They should default to a more modern interface rather than asking newbies to make the change.

Is Google “much loathed”? It’s thanks to Google that the world’s largest browser engine and operating system are both open source. Yes we can list bad things they’ve done but they’ve also done a lot of good.