Reducing my dependence on US tech: step by step

A progress update on reducing my dependence on US tech, covering email, storage, browsers, AI tools, e‑books, and the practical trade‑offs so far.

Why I started, and why I’m still cautious

This journey started as a risk assessment, not a moral stance. The core question wasn’t whether US platforms are good or bad, but what my exit cost actually is if legal, political, or commercial assumptions change.

Over time, I realised how deeply my digital life depended on a small number of US-based platforms, and how tightly those services are coupled. The problem isn’t any single dependency, but the way they reinforce each other. Leaving one service often means touching several others at once.

I’ve written more about that motivation in Why I’m reducing my dependence on US tech. What follows here is a practical checkpoint on how that assessment is playing out in daily use.

As I chip away at existing dependencies, new ones keep surfacing. Some are easy to unwind, like Goodreads. Others carry high exit costs, like Apple CarPlay.

Long-term use also creates behavioural lock-in. Years of the same interfaces produce micro-habits that quietly raise switching costs. Email is tied to passwords. Microsoft Office is tied to OneDrive. Apple Photos is tied to iCloud, which is tied to your Apple ID. You can’t swap out single components in isolation.

That makes sequencing critical. I’ve tried to map these dependencies in a dependency map. Even so, the reality is messier and far less linear than any diagram suggests.

Browser: from installed to default

This was the first item I swapped out, and it turned out to be relatively painless. I described my initial decision‑making in Switching from Chrome to Vivaldi.

I’ve now been using Vivaldi for some time, mixed with Chrome, which initially remained my default browser. The real switch only happened once I changed that default.

I still struggle to locate all my bookmarks per user profile. While they were successfully imported, they’re not in the same places. This is one of those micro‑habits that takes time to relearn.

Vivaldi’s panes feature, which lets me keep two websites side by side in a single window, turned out to be more than a novelty. It genuinely improves how I work, especially when comparing sources or writing while referencing material.

The lesson here was simple: alternatives only count once they’re frictionless. Having an app installed doesn’t change behaviour. Making it the default does.

Email: the first real decoupling step

Email was the first serious break. After roughly twenty years on Gmail, I moved to Infomaniak. I’ve written in more detail in What it really takes to leave Gmail after 20 years, so I won’t repeat the full story here.

I did consider Proton as an alternative. In the end, I stuck with Infomaniak for pragmatic reasons: pricing, bundling, and the broader ecosystem rather than ideological purity.

Day to day, Infomaniak works well. The iOS and macOS apps are surprisingly slick and stable. Email arrives, search works, nothing feels fragile. Gmail is still better at a few specific things. Unsubscribing from newsletters is frictionless in Gmail; here it takes more effort. I also miss simple gestures like swipe‑to‑archive, which now cost me an extra click. None of this is dramatic, but it is noticeable.

Storage and documents: cautious experimentation

Alongside email, Infomaniak includes kDrive, positioned as an alternative to Google Drive. I’ve only just started experimenting with it.

At first glance, the basics are there: document and spreadsheet editors that feel familiar enough if you’re coming from Google Docs and Sheets. There’s also a macOS sync client, so files appear locally much like a traditional drive.

The value proposition is clear. 50 GB of storage included in the same subscription is generous compared to Google’s 15 GB. What’s missing, for now, is confidence. I haven’t pushed it hard enough to know where the edges are, how collaboration holds up, or how much I trust it for critical workflows. This is firmly in the testing phase, not yet a deep replacement.

AI: where the discomfort starts

Infomaniak includes access to Euria, its own large language model, so I experimented with that as well. It is based on the Qwen3 LLM. Functionally, it’s adequate for straightforward, non-sensitive tasks.

The issue isn’t output quality, but trust boundaries. When asked about politically sensitive topics such as China, Taiwan, or Tiananmen Square, responses became evasive in ways that appeared systematic rather than incidental. This isn’t about disagreeing with an answer; it’s about not being able to tell why an answer is shaped or withheld.

That makes the claim here deliberately narrow. I’m not asserting geopolitical intent or policy alignment, only that observable behaviour limits the tool’s usefulness for open-ended reasoning and exploration.

My stance remains pragmatic. It’s acceptable for utility tasks, and it comes bundled with the email subscription. It’s not suitable as a primary thinking aid. For now, this remains an uncomfortable but bounded compromise.

eBooks: rediscovering ownership

E‑books turned out to be a surprisingly satisfying area of progress. I set up Calibre and started exporting EPUBs from my Kindle library where possible. As of early 2026, that’s easier than it used to be, though still limited. You need to check titles one by one, and most books are still not downloadable.

On the hardware side, I dusted off an old Kobo reader, which works well as a non‑Amazon endpoint. More importantly, I started buying new books from non‑US EPUB stores, including Australian sellers.

The real shift here isn’t brand replacement but ownership. Files I can store, back up, convert, and move are fundamentally different from books that exist only as licensed access inside a platform.

Passwords: an unresolved problem

Passwords are still an open issue. KeePass remains my baseline, but the hard part isn’t the vault itself. It’s secure, trustworthy synchronisation and storage that doesn’t pull me straight back into a US‑centric cloud.

This problem is harder than email or books because mistakes here have immediate security consequences. For now, this is clearly next up rather than solved.

How this actually feels in daily use

Day to day, this shift means more conscious choices and slightly more manual effort. Small friction points appear more often: extra clicks, missing conveniences, slower workflows.

At the same time, control has increased in meaningful places. Owning my domain, owning my files, and having exit options changes how dependent I feel, even when the tools themselves aren’t perfect.

Where I am now

This is still surface-level progress. Some switches feel solid, others remain provisional. Nothing here is irreversible, and that’s intentional. The immediate next problem to tackle is finding a viable alternative to 1Password.