I can’t root my phone because I don’t have an image for it (Moto G73) although I’d like to, but for some reason my banking app thinks it’s rooted and refuses to work. This happened just after I updated it, it wasn’t happening before.
Edit: I’m regretting not getting the Motorola Edge 40 Neo, which also costs £250, but is slightly better in multiple ways, and seems like it has better root support.
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Just FYI, rootkit malware does exist for phones
If you didn’t root your phone, but multiple root detection apps go off (don’t just try one), there’s a good chance some piece of malware managed to root your phone. This is exactly the scenario banking apps include root detection kits for. It could be a false positive, but this certainly warrants further investigation.
If other apps also indicate root access (i.e. antivirus apps), it’s probably best to restore factory settings and hope this clears up the infection. If it doesn’t, you’ll need to restore the entire system from a factory image (if that’s possible in the first place) and hope your phone doesn’t get infected again.
I would advice installing multiple antivirus apps and having them scan your phone. If they also tell you you’ve been rooted, I would trust them to tell the truth. If they don’t report root access, but do report a bunch of viruses, the virus may have found a way to evade root detection by AV and may be installing weird apps in exchange for money from shitty ad fraud companies. If none of them are throwing up any warnings and only this specific app is complaining, you might want to wait a while and see if it goes away; if could just be a bug in your banking app.
If you can’t clear the infection, I’m afraid your phone is rootkitted. In that case, I would recommend you not to use it for anything important. To prevent your phone becoming part of a botnet, you might need to remove your SIM, not enter your WiFi credentials after the next factory reset, and consider leaving it off entirely. If you start needing to enter more and more CAPTCHAs to enter websites, that can be a sign of some kind of infection on your network. If you’ve noticed something like that recently, it may be connected.
Your phone was last updated almost a year ago, so if you were infected, it may just be a matter of time before you’re infected again.Edit: I was wrong, it’ll receive security updates until early 2026. Staying away from pirated apps and apps from sketchy sources may help prevent reinfection.Hypatia, which is the only antivirus I could find on F-Droid, didn’t return any negative results. It would be helpful to be able to monitor my internet and what connections my phone is making, but all I have is simple net monitor, which can tell me the speed and nothing else. I can see there’s background network activity, but no way to tell if it’s legitimate (for something like syncthing) or malicious.
An app with root access can easily bypass the statistics gathered by these apps, unless those apps are run as root.
I don’t know Hypathia, I’d suggest grabbing something from the Play Store (through Aurora, if you must).
If you degoogled your phone through a different ROM, the app is probably triggering on the fact you’re running with an unlocked bootloader rather than just root access.
Im not running with a different ROM, but I did unlock the bootloader in case I did ever find a way to root my phone/install a custom ROM, I wouldn’t lose my data.
That would trigger it probably, they just couldn’t be bothered making 2 error messages
This is your problem. Big ROM makers typically have a list of banking apps they work with. Could also happen if you don’t have Play Services.
While I agree with most of what you said, I’m pretty sure the phone gets monthly security updates.
Hmm, weird. That website wasn’t in any of my Google search results. I guess it’s because of their weird SPA design? It also seems to provide security update information from before the phone was released? Your link just provides a bunch of details about CVEs for me.
But I looked again at the Motorola site and it does appear the phone receives updates up until 2026, so you’re absolutely right. Motorola should really publish this data somewhere easier to find, IMO.
Maybe not ideal but I’m sure the web version of your banking app would work through a browser.
It does, but it’s not designed for mobile. I would send a screenshot, but I don’t trust myself to censor everything important.
Try to use a desktop, try different browsers if needed, if you cannot, you may need to physically go to the bank.
Is it OEM unlocked?
Wasn’t there talk about Google deprecating SafetyNet? If this has already happened and your banking app is still relying on it, it could lead to a fslse positive on the root check I believe.
More and more every day, I wish the Firefox Phone had survived.
It kinda did survive. KaiOS is forked from Firefox OS, though it’s more designed for Kinda-Smart feature phones in developing countries.
Firefox had a phone? I wish Firefox would try again.
They did. It was a project initially called “Boot to Gecko,” about a decade ago; and the idea was to make a Linux kernel OS so lightweight that you were running web apps as close to bare metal as possible. There were intended to be no binary apps, only web apps running on open standards; though that didn’t necessarily carry through as originally intended.
I agree. I think it was before its time and would be a real boon today.
I can’t remember much about it but I seem to remember that the actual hardware itself was very entry level which was part of the problem. It really would have done better to appeal to enthusiasts.
I get that it was marketed at third world countries, but I still think they would have done better had they had a western version with more up-to-date specs as well, if only to get the kind of market share that would encourage app developers.
Yeah, I read a retrospective written by one of the developers, and it sounds like they had the trouble that they could only get development partners for low-end devices (which kind of meant that they had to target developing countries) but they couldn’t get companies like WhatsApp to make web apps that would run on Firefox OS (which meant that it was kind of a non-starter in those developing countries).
Couple that with some questionable priority decisions at the top of the project, and a major reshuffling of Mozilla’s organizational aims near the end of the project, and it all just sort of fell apart. I do kind of wonder if it would have done better today, or maybe as a tablet or a Roku competitor.
