Public administrations across Europe are moving cloud storage, collaboration and code hosting to open source and federated alternatives. The mobile devices of employees are usually not yet part of these discussions. We intend to change this.

It is vital that Europe moves towards become more sovereign in the mobile area. >60% of all internet traffic today comes from smartphones and >80% of employees indicate that they use their smartphones for work. Yet, staff phones in Europe keep running American operating systems bound to infrastructure outside European jurisdiction.

The risks involved are not theoretical. In 2025 the United States sanctioned Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, and the measures reached services dependent on American providers. Any organisation whose staff devices sit inside a single foreign vendor ecosystem carries comparable exposure.

This talk treats the phone as part of the sovereign stack. We explain that /e/OS, a European operating system based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), combined with European-hosted or self-hosted mobile device management (MDM), is the right approach to achieving sovereignty for your organization and its employees in the mobile area.

Today, /e/OS, the largest European mobile OS, already has more than 100.000 active users, a number which is growing rapidly at 60% per year. Pilots and deployments of /e/OS have started across Europe, both in the public and private sector. In this talk we will show why: explain all the things that the OS can already do today and what are plans are to improve further in the future.
Attendees will leave this talk with a smartphone sovereignty checklist: what already works, what does not, and what concrete steps you can make today as a public sector organization or as a company to make sure that your mobile stack becomes sovereign and under your control.