My Google pay was recently locked, probably as a result of moving countries and using VPNs. To make matters worse, with a locked account I can't change play store countries and access the local play store, so I can't get the app from my accounting firm (Which would seriously make my life easier). It finally hit me that I don't own my phone.

I have (own is the wrong word) a pixel 2 and used to pay Google ~$400/year for YouTube, domains, gsuite, hangouts dailer...

My next phone will be a librem, though I'm going to wait until my pixel dies. I'll probably also buy a cheap iPhone for apps I can't get on the librem.

Could you not download the APK for that apps and installed directly?

Don't get me wrong, I had not realised google was locking the play store and totally agree that it is an issue, but wondering if that could have helped you at the time.

Also, I run lineageOS to be able to update old phones with recent Android version, and tend to get better battery life and faster boot!

I have a "workaround" for you: On another phone, download the apps, and you can transfer the APK to your phone to install the app without the play store. You can also download alternative to google play store.

Unfortunately there's no Google Pay equivalent, right?

To pay for Google's services? Yes, you would be right.

I meant for contactless payment - I'd be interested to see how an open version of that could ever develop.

Why not just use the contactless card your bank gives you? Or, if you don't want to pay directly out of your checking account, get a credit/pre-paid card? They are all contactless these days, and even the small tea shop that processes card payments through an Android tablet and a small Bluetooth reader is able to accept the contactless cards.

Two reasons:

1. My bank doesn't give me a contactless card

2. It's much more convenient anyway, I don't have to reach into my wallet.

I am, although being Gnome 3 based it won't be the snappy experience one would expect. I can understand their choice though: having to liberate a tablet recently (Asus T101) I tried at first to use XFCE as I do on all my other hardware, but though it ran really fast that was a usability nightmare: absolutely no way to have a reliable screen rotation and trackpad management without patching here and editing there with the risk that it would lose the functionality at the first upgrade. I also tried lxde, mate and other light desktops with results from bad to very bad (wrt screen rotation, all hardware except camera runs fine) then just before giving up I threw Gnome3 at it which worked immediately, but it's definitely a resource hog.

the Librem 5 phone will actually be using their own Phosh [1] shell - made for mobile devices. It's targeting GTK3+ apps but it is not GNOME 3 based.

[1] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/phosh

It's "GNOME 3 based" in that they're working within the GNOME project and using their apps, but it doesn't use GNOME-Shell which is the resource-hog part of GNOME 3.

Thanks for correcting me, that's really good news. And besides, porting this to non mobile devices would be a lot less stupid than it might appear.

pureOS not so much, but the potential of a mainlined mobile device, yes.