I recently bought a phone from Volla that ships with ubuntu touch. Somewhat painful, but entirely possible to use. I also backed the liberux indiegogo for a more modern proper mainline linux phone again.

I'm just not using any google play and ios exclusive apps and services anymore. Yea it's painful but if you want to see an ecosystem outside of google play and ios, you have to buy and use it. Just be prepared to be the 0.1% that literally nobody cares about. Like when traveling I can follow my ICE train schedule on the Deutsche Bahn website, but it will log me out and delete my entire state after 15 minutes or so of inactivity. Or a couple of years ago I saw that uber had a web app and at some point wanted to order one for a group. turns out when trying to finish the order (which you can't dry run), I got a generic error and someone with the app had to order. After uber sent me 125 marketing mails after that, telling me to order discounted food with uber eats, I think I finally unsubscribed (I only didn't earlier out of morbid curiosity).

Personally I live by just not using this stuff is better than being like "oh I need waydroid to run android in a container and use the reverse engineered reimplementation of google play, and also need to fake some stuff to pass integrity checks etc. to use an E-Scooter".

This might be a hot take but the best way to avoid or "bypass" onerous things like the "integrity API" is to opt out of the proprietary world as much as possible. Use exclusively free (Libre) software and technology where you can.

We should not be thinking in terms of how do we get proprietary crapware onto our free systems, because that defeats the purpose of a free system. The idea is to build an alternative to the proprietary world.

GrapheneOS is already working on it:

We're going to add a secure way of working around this without breaking the app source security model. We'll be adding support for having the OS automatically verify the Play Store signing metadata and then inform Play services those apps were installed from the Play Store.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114554622772349562

IMO the only reason tech world can be authoritarian is people's negligence. Otherwise even if all major brands produce unhackable locked down hardware, people could boycott those and buy the one obscure open device (like pine64) and market force will force big names to revert.

Corporations do not have power by themselves. People refusing to think and understand gives them power. Same applies to mainstream politics.

Google is banned in china so 1/6 of the world population can bypass it automatically. You need state power to deal with oppressive corpos.

Do you think we can find a way to bypass these,

Yes. Direct physical access always wins. A device in my hands is my device.

or is the future of the digital world just authoritarian and dystopian?

Yes. Many people aren't going to explore the solutions, or be willing to give up the convenience that comes with not changing what they're doing.

I sadly believe we’re fucked

If you can root your phone and use an xposed module, maybe. Or the EU forces them. Otherwise, there's not much option.

Well the idea of having attestation isn't the problem. The problem is that apps requiring attestation (banks, insurance providers, ID-systems) use the most convenient solution. Slapping on Googles prebuild attestation. Graphene for example, provides alternative attestation for their OS and offers docs for anyone to implement a more fitting set of checks.

There are two approaches here: If you're upset that your hacked-to-bits, rooted, unlocked and/or unencrypted device is failing checks: I'd say, tough luck. Until we can create provably untampered app-containers, that level of access genuinely breaks TOS on apps and regulations on handling personal data. Breaking those checks is then breaking those compliances in an unsafe way.

If you believe your setup is actually secure and compliant, just not in a way the allmighty Google intended: Try and get an attestation module for your setup. Fight for these apps to accept non-Google attestation and fight for devices that don't artificially limit what can pass as secure.

I switched to a feature phone that has nothing to do with Android for calling (Mocor RTOS aka S30+) because I'm tired of fighting Android for the moment. I keep an unrooted smartphone at home for online banking. Kinda extreme but that's one way.

It's a rat race. You can only win by not playing.