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It’s going to take some time to change the entire system. Remember that up until recently, while not super ideal, we still thought that the US, at the end of the day, was our allies. It’s easy to sit and be a captain hindsight, but until recently, it was the smartest thing to keep things as they were, as to not put extra financial strain on everybody. Now we have no choice and I for one am very happy that we are making the move to separating ourselves from America because I have hated the US since Bush and always felt they had too much influence over on us in Europe.
At the same time, I’m not gonna sit and piss and moan about all the American tech we still use or when European countries honor weapons deals they made before America went insane. Change is slow, frustratingly slow, but we are moving. It is happening. It’s just not gonna happen over night to appease impatient people who have no idea how big of an ask it is to have all European systems switch to open source. That is going to take years and a lot of money, but it is happening. My government has already had an entire department switch to Linux to test it and I believe that they will continue to make changes in that direction as the years pass.
But sure, one can also bitch about the current state of things not being perfect and up to your personal standard. Thats also a strategy.
America isn't the reason I don't use Google Play Services... Google is the reason for that specific choice for me.
In my world it’s the same thing, but I get what you mean. I have an android phone and the only reason I haven’t switched to something else yet is because it’s a relatively new phone (bought it in 2022) and I’m the type to keep my phone until it dies of old age or it breaks beyond repair. Until this one croaks, I’ll be stuck with android for awhile, but good on you for switching.
Sadly I'm not completely switched away yet, I'm doing the best I can with the sacrifices I'm willing to make and accepting what I can't. I run GOS on a pixel, it has GPS but severely locked down, most apps get denied the network permission and pretty much nothing has access to any data outside of limited storage scopes or the minimum contacts (i.e. Android Auto can only see two contacts in my phone and can't see any SMS/messaging.
Beyond that I do the usual Google replacements (Nextcloud for files/seedvault backups, immich for photo backups, CoMaps instead of Google Maps, etc).
I yern for the day I can have an old flip phone with a hotspot built in for a few apps on other devices (or bt tethering).
Yes, breaking the dependency on cloud providers is already extremely hard. But breaking the dependency on mobile OSes is going to be dramatically harder. What good is digital sovereignty if all users are still tied to American products to access those systems?
I am not just talking about cloud providers. I am talking about all American tech. The whole thing. That’s why it won’t happen over night, but it will happen and is already happening. That’s why Peter Thiel is out there having his weird little religious psychosis and claiming that Europe will fall if we don’t stay with America. He’s scared. He and Trump squeezed too hard on the Greenland issue, thought too highly of their status and power and now they will have to witness the consequences of threatening your own allies over and over. It is done and they know it and now they are scrambling, but the only tactic they know is threats so fneh.
I am very confident that we will see a new tech boom in Europe that will fill in where American tech used to be. So while a lot of things are terrible right now and America seemingly is desperate to self sabotage because success got boring or whatever, I am genuinely excited for the future of Europe. It’s not going to be easy or painless, but we are moving in the right direction in many areas and I see all the bad waves of far right ideologies as a phase. It may take decades, who knows, but Europe is moving in the right direction and I have never been more proud to be one than I currently am.
America will also come to its senses when trump and his morons have been kicked out of power, but the damage done to that nation will be felt for decades to come. I think that when I’m a senile old lady, America will still be dealing with the consequences of electing trump in the 2020s. That’s what I think.
Change only happens as a result of bitching.
Depends on the kind of bitching, but yeah. I don’t think our European leaders aren’t aware nor unwilling to make the changes. They very much are. It’s just taking a long time and terminally online people don’t really understand that because they have gotten too used to getting everything immediately.