Your Digital ID Runs on Google and Apple's Safety Net
European digital ID wallets depend on Google and Apple safety services, raising hard questions about sovereignty and what 'open' infrastructure really means.
The signal: European governments are shipping digital ID wallets that quietly depend on Google and Apple’s safety infrastructure under the hood.
Why it matters: If you’re building anything that touches identity, compliance, or “sovereign” digital infrastructure, you now have a concrete example of how platform dependency creeps in at the OS layer — before your code even runs. Your product’s trust model inherits someone else’s trust model whether you like it or not.
The pattern I’m watching: The .self TLD for self-hosting and open agentic models like Ornith-1.0 are all pointing the same direction — builders are actively trying to escape platform capture. But governments are walking straight into it. The gap between self-sovereignty rhetoric and actual infrastructure dependency is widening, not closing.
What I’d do with this: If you’re building identity or compliance tooling, document your full dependency chain down to the OS safety layer — your enterprise customers will start asking for this within 18 months. And if you’re pitching to EU public sector, “no hidden platform dependencies” is now a real differentiator worth leading with.