While Apple especially under Tim Cook has done a lot questionable acquiescences under Cook for political expediences, they really didn’t have a choice here. It was the law.
Now going back on Twitter to get in the good graces of President Musk and bringing TikTok back to the AppStore even though it is clearly against the law is different.
They did have a choice. They could have said they will just get out of UK. That would have resulted in enough political turmoil in UK that their government would roll back this stupid law. Apple chickened out.
> Now going back on Twitter to get in the good graces of President Musk and bringing TikTok back to the AppStore even though it is clearly against the law is different.
If you don't want to be sued by activist investors, you need a good reason for that, and to be able to tell those investors what else you tried first before escalating that far if you eventually do pull out of a market.
Abandoning the UK market would hurt Apple more than it would hurt the UK. They are not a nation-state, Apple cannot wage diplomacy by threatening the government, they can only shoot their own foot off and say it was for the good of everyone.
It would also partially validate the EU's regulation if they abandoned the UK but stayed in Europe. Apple very much doesn't want to feed either side a line.
Then instead of mandating a backdoor to cloud data, the UK would just mandate backdoor access to the devices themselves, again forcing Apple's hand to either comply or GTFO, if they want it bad enough.
We're losing the fight, and people are as apathetic as ever around privacy and security issues.
Besides, never trust E2EE where you don't control both ends, but everyone here should have already known that.
I wasn't sure which way they'd go.