[sidstling]

I work for a Danish city with 60.000 inhabitants, so we're a small team, and because of that we looked into flutter since it seems like an easy way to do mobile for people apt at c-like languages. We even had some internal talks about angularDart and flutter being comparable to react and reactNative.

Our proof of concept wasn't that much of a hit though. Flutter integrates really, really well with Firebase, but being the public sector in Europe, I don't see us using Google cloud anytime soon. Without it we couldn't really get a full stack dart thing running because stuff like aqueduct isn't mature enough, and is really hard to run within Azure. At least if you want to run comparable to other options seeing how application insights even works on Node.

Dart is a nice language, and Flutter is certainly an easy way to do mobile apps, but I don't see us using either, unless they becomes much more popular.

[netheril96]

Why is the public sector in Europe staying away from Google but not Microsoft (Azure)?

[sidstling]

Microsoft was a lot faster to accept and accompany our privacy terms. The EU data protection laws that you've seen all the fuzz about may be new for the private sector, but in much of the public sector we've actually been under much stricter requirements for years. If you have a big enough agreement with Microsoft, you can even have your data stored on servers you have physical access to and share with no-one else.

AWS was a little slower, but now meet the same requirements, pretty much. Other parts of the public sector is big in AWS instead of Azure.

Google only recently got into any type of real agreements with the EU on data protection, and they're still far from having national agreements. They also don't meet EU requirements on all their products, making it easier to blacklist all Google products than risk your GIS department using Google Maps or your PR department using Google analytics, both illegal for public usage.

For us personally we have more than 25 years of partnership with Microsoft, who have an excellent record on support. By contrast we've never really worked with Google, and we're not typically the ones to try new things. :) Especially not when we're happy with what we have, and since we already have a presence in Azure, I doubt we'll be expanding to another Cloud when pricing is pretty competitive between them. I mean, to run two clouds would also mean our operations crew would need to obtain security certifications for both, which is fairly expensive.

Technically and legally we could sign an agreement for Firebase in particular, and host our mobile apps with a Firebase backend, but as that's not likely to happen, Dart would need to become popular enough to integrate seamlessly and easily with Azure for us to use it.

[detaro]

One reason could be that from what I understand Azure licenses it's cloud software to other providers ("Azure Stack"), so you can get "Azure" run by a European company in an European data center, or even a state-owned one.