From a purely pragmatic point of view, a lot of especially Eastern Europe and Eastern Germany are viscerally aware that "anything you're doing socially, religiously, politically" will always somehow include something illegal and worrying about surveillance results in self-censorship.

I really don't think that's unreasonable, the fall of the berlin wall was within living memory. I hope that the NSA isn't going to do anything too, but the idea that they can't or won't is clearly not true. Staying under the radar might feel pragmatic, but I think a lot of people realize that's entirely inadequate with constantly shifting political environments.

Threat model, I get that.

The simple fact that this explanation can exist and is somewhat commonly agreed by tech-savvy people is... disturbing in some way.

I mean, underlying are freedom, rights, security, surveillance, But also geopolitics, economics, philosophy maybe.

Just behind some daily tech.

Considering the current target of deplatforming is the far-right, and given Germany's history specifically, they have a lot of reasons not to trust local hardware and software. The same goes for the Le Pen crowd in France, a somewhat adversarial government on the other side of the globe is often less risky than the status quo across the pond allied to the current French establishment.

I know first hand that Nokia top and middle management understood nothing about software development or quality. The tools and practices used in the whole development were horrible. After a couple of years they just drowned in bugs and new products came slower and slower, failed projects more and more frequent.

I have no idea whether it's equally bad at Google/Android or Apple. I have the feeling it's not.

I don't think China really dominates in software world-wide. Xiaomi seems more like an exception to me. Hardware is a different story.