I’m always suspicious when someone tells me they’re decent and honest. Silence is a virtue and virtue is silent. Which is to say: i’ve never been crazy about Tim Cook. If he really believed in the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr, he wouldn’t just sell colourful Apple Watch bands, but make the effort to get at least one African-American person on his leadership team. If he had to endure the actual consequences of homophobia, he wouldn’t just sell colourful Apple Watch bands, but speak out against the efforts to systematically discriminate against members of the LGBTQ communities.

But those watch bands sure are colourful, and representation matters, so i thought his grandstanding was a necessary evil. Turns out, he’s no evil, just another immensely privileged and intensely bland number crusher. I can’t deny he’s good at his soul-crushing job: he bought his seat at Trump’s table for a mere million dollars and only had to feature an openly fascist ‘social’ network on the App Store to get a tax reprieve. What things you can accomplish when your only moral compass is the sacrosanct ‘shareholder value maximization’! A friendship of convenience is still a friendship, which means Tim Cook has to be described as a friend of Trump’s. A trade war is still a war, which means Donald Trump is my (entire continent’s) enemy. A friend of an enemy can’t be my friend.

Even though i own a Fairphone 5, i can’t ditch my iPhone, not while I’m still employed as a tech journalist anyway. However, i can do everything in my power to minimize Apple’s hold on it and maximize my use of European alternatives. The bulk of the work is done by Proton:

• i was already using Proton Mail for my personal e-mail;
• i’ll switch to Proton Calendar at the end of the school year;
• i’ve imported all of my files into Proton Drive;
• it took me all of ten minutes to switch to Proton Pass;
• Proton VPN is a nice side benefit.

Proton operates out of Switzerland, just like Infomaniak (where i host all of my websites and get all of my domain names) and Silvio Rizzi (the developer of the wonderful Reeder feed reader and the cute Mela recipe manager). Lest i be accused of betraying my own country, let it be known that i listen to music on Qobuz with Audirvana, watch movies on Canal+, block ads with NextDNS and ride my (Dutch) bike with Geovelo. I write in a German app, Ulysses, and draw in a Dutch one, Sketch. My Oura ring comes from Finland, which is also where i get my weather updates. For the last few weeks, i’ve been using a Norwegian browser, Vivaldi.

It might well be impossible to use only European apps and services, but it’s not implausible to imagine living a digital life without American ones. My trusty Antidote and the awesome Transit are from Québec, GoodLinks is from Vietnam, Letterboxd is from New Zealand and The Storygraph is from the United Kingdom, which may or may not count as a European country. I’m happy to see that a lot of the open-source software i’ve come to rely on has European roots, such as Home Assistant (Netherlands) and Organic Maps (Estonia), not to mention Linux of course (Finland).

Which leaves me with a few intractable issues:

• Qwant and Ecosia still aren’t good enough search engines that i can consider moving away from Kagi;
• i’ve yet to find a photo app that combines syncing and editing. I might have to go back to two separate apps, in which case i’ll probably default to Proton Drive for syncing and DxO PhotoLab for editing;
• i really don’t want to switch from Duolingo to Babbel;
• there don’t seem to be any European podcast players left.

It could be worse – I could be living in the United States.