One counter point is young people drive the technology trends. Look at how social media and the Internet in general took off in the early 2000-2010s, it was driven by younger generations using these technologies. Now everyone is on social media after the younger generations at the time pioneered it.

If younger generations do rejected apps, smart phones, and surveillance capitalism, maybe there could be change in the direction.

It is relatively easy to find an English speaking tech job in Germany. If you have a university degree, then you can get the EU Blue Card.

Another big problem not mentioned in the article is companies refusing to hire QA engineers to do actual testing before releasing.

The last two American companies I worked for had fired all the QA engineers or refused to hire any. Engineers were supposed to “own” their features and test them themselves before release. It’s obvious that this can’t provide the same level of testing and the software gets released full of bugs and only the happy path works.

What if there were only two car companies?

I think Apple is responsible by releasing new APIs that are only available on the specific iOS version. Rarely have they back ported functionality to older iOS versions. Apple draggles shinny new APIs in front of developers causing them to update the minimum version.

Yeah Apple rapidly dropping support with Intel Macs is really terrible. I have a 2018 Mac mini that is already obsolete, what a joke. That was the last Mac I buy.

The security updates for old iOS versions are a sleight of hand. Most companies only support the three latest versions of iOS, so soon that will be iOS 17 as the minimum. I had a device stuck on iOS 15, which was released in 2016, and banks and other major apps dropped support. So while the phone did get security updates, it can’t run the apps I needed.

You also need every company to develop for a third mobile platform, where two different ones are already a big ask.

Easy solution would be to run existing apps on Linux, probably would be Android.

Another solution would we move to PWAs to have apps in the browser.

Both these things already happened on desktop Linux with Windows games using Proton and most proprietary desktop apps switching to Electron.