European Digital ID Hands Keys to Google and Apple
Story 48730729 makes the argument that European digital ID wallets, meant to give citizens sovereign control over their identity, will in practice run through Google and Apple's mobile platforms. The comment thread is blunt: a European digital identity system that depends entirely on two US companies is not sovereignty, it's performance. Microsoft gave up on Windows Phone, there is no third mobile platform at scale, and the EU has no credible alternative.
This connects to a broader pattern: governments building digital infrastructure increasingly have to choose between security theater and practical adoption. Building a native European mobile OS is not a realistic option, so the EU is stuck distributing its sovereign identity layer through foreign corporate app stores.
The thread also gestures at the irony: Europe has spent years fighting Google and Apple on competition grounds while simultaneously cementing their role as the only viable distribution channel for critical public infrastructure.
So what?
If you're building identity, authentication, or compliance tooling for European markets, you need to understand that the EU's digital ID framework will run through Apple and Google's APIs and policies. That's a platform dependency risk for any product in that space. It also means that any startup trying to offer a privacy-preserving alternative has to compete with government-backed infrastructure distributed through the same duopoly.