iOS 18.2 Lets EU Users Delete App Store, Safari, Messages, Camera and Photos
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Some examples:
Only Messages and Mail can provide OTPs, again only when using the system keyboard.
When swiping the lock screen to the left, only the system Camera is allowed to appear.
When using navigation, only Apple Maps is allowed to provide the navigation overlay on the lock screen and Apple Watch.
After years, the default Mail app can be changed, but AFAICT that doesn’t do anything other than override mailto links. However, this functionality isn’t available for Calendar for example.
Similarly, you can’t override natural language Siri incantations to use your preferred apps. Like “message X” always uses Messages or “remind me of X” can only use Reminders. And alarms and timers can only use the Clock app.
I really want Apple to fix all of this, but I guess it’s easier to act like the “deletion” of system apps provides a level playing field. The real problem is that the default apps lack a lot of other features that only third parties provide - but Apple can’t be assed to improve them.
This is where there is a big difference in what the ultra few power users want and what normal users want. Ultra power users want to be able to install an app file for a random app with app store like experience and with as less hurdles as possible, while normal users are very scared of receiving an apk file in whatsapp and installing it by mistake (there is a spectrum here and it's not binary).
Why not at least Gmail, Chrome, and gBoard? Millions of “non power users” use these apps over Apple’s offering.
You're right! But most normal users DO really want the app they CHOOSE to be able to provide OTPs!
I mean, you as a human only ever pay the minimal price for a product that they will sell it to you for. Why would any other human do otherwise?
Your parent comment isn’t suggesting they go “above and beyond”, they’re saying they don’t even do the bare minimum to comply. Those are wildly different things.
And as to why Apple would do it (either comply or go above and beyond), there are numerous reasons:
* To avoid government intervention. All the stuff they’re being forced to do was absolutely avoidable. The writing has been on the wall for long.
* To not have to keep paying fines.
* To not trash their reputation.
* For long-term customer satisfaction.
* So developers, which they depend on, don’t hate them. Just look at the Vision Pro, which shipped with no apps from the big players.
In short, being an asshole only made short-term business sense. In the long run, they should strive to do better.
But they very much are not, which is a point the EU Commission continues to hammer on.
If I can sell something physical that I don't need anymore, I should be able to do so with the things I "bought" on, let's say, Steam.
In theory this could’ve happened with DVDs, but it was too much hassle for a single disc to be shared by that many people.
You could compromise with restrictions on how many times a file could be sold etc, but that concedes the point of a digital good not really being your property. And it might be used as a Trojan horse for even more DRM and surveillance.
You're not thinking creatively enough. One day, somebody's going to use the law and make the "sales" API-driven. This will then turn it into a rental service where you can "buy" a game for two hours for $37.50 and then "sell" the game back to the mother ship for $36.50 of credit. The mother ship being, of course, whatever VC firm puts millions into having the world's largest Steam account.
I don't have to like the current ecosystem of no-transfers and DRM, to acknowledge breaking all that down would have major economic consequences against studios. Right now is especially not the time to be asking for this, because the whole video game industry is in deep financial trouble at the moment.
Books you take out for a week or more usually, games rentals and films (from the olden days when I'd get to go to an actual store) were at least several days.
Renting a film is something you could do from the second you start watching it to the second it finishes. Going from a few days to hours makes this in the region of 10-100 times faster turnaround.
Having to physically move things just adds significant time.
With software you can share it out to anyone in the world.
Isn’t it hilarious how having property rights and freedoms over Things You Paid For is now unthinkable??
Digitising your library example, would likely result in a price of zero. Someone like Apple would be well placed to turn its books app into a library of books it purchased once. And use this to get more hardware sales.
The current system of only one entity having rights isn’t desirable. But alternatives aren’t easy. Even if you tried to rule out sales for profit then marketplaces and bulletin boards would make things complicated.
Most people aren't interested in routinely selling and buying their media, so I would wager that most digital copies will end up on the digital "shelf" just like physical copies do, rather than being routinely sold off.
Lending them without cost, like a library, I don't think they could stop you. But commercially renting out the physical media wasn't an automatic right, as far as I know.
> Borrow and enjoy audiobooks, eBooks, comics, movies, TV, magazines, or music everywhere you have a screen-your computer, your phone, your car, even your TV. All you need is a library card.
Also, Libby [1]
A popular book can change hand a million times and save a lot of money, carbon emission, tree cutting, paper production cost, transport and logistics. The problem is careful usage and patience, i.e. not spilling coffee or food and waiting may be a year before a copy is available.
As well as making the most expensive price the same globally e.g. buying apps in Bangladesh to resell in the US.
Making the entire industry worse off for everyone else except you.
https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-premium-cost-around...
The idea that every developer is going to reduce their revenue by 20x is delusional.
Seems a little to late for that, everything is a bloody in-app purchase or subscription already. I really wish I could filter out apps with in-app purchases or subscriptions when searching the app store, but that would probably ruin the business of countless companies.
I know it’s not really a zero sum game, but it’s obvious it would have a significant impact.
And I’m not even talking about media, which I’m sure some platform would start mass renting/selling in a fully automated fashion (upload all your licenses, watch whatever you want anytime because there will always be somewhere a license which is unused and a copy of the movie which is not actively watched at this moment). Basically they would only sell as many copies as the peak number of simultaneous watchers…
That would be amazing actually.
I'd expect the opposite: competition between the "used" and the "new" markets would drive prices down, not up. Mathematically, you'd be increasing the supply, while keeping the demand nearly the same, which in the traditional supply and demand model means lower prices.
Users can't gift/resell what they don't own ;-)
When you resell a physical item it’s worn and costs time & effort to resell. Software is very different. That means no one would ever buy the software from the developer once a few copies are sold and can be passed around.
That would force SaaS even harder, since developers would need to justify it being a license.
Why doesn't the EU apply these same rules to video game consoles (Xbox/PlayStation)?
They arguably have an even more restrictive environment than iOS.
So, yes.
The answer is only "yes" if you ignore reality.
Yes, they're computers, but so is your washing machine. But these aren't general purpose computing devices. To me, it makes no sense to enforce a free-for-all for those.
The answer is no.
Anyway, please consider stopping trolling.
e.g. Can you pay for groceries with it like you can with a phone? Can you use it to pay for food at a restaurant, buy train tickets, or many other things are in many cases cashless.
"access online banking and manage asset" is a shorter way of saying all of the myriad of ways people need to use online banking day to day.
> a phrase I’ve mostly read in stupid comments about Twitter in the last couple of years.
I try not to read stupid content so I don't know.
> Anyway, please consider stopping trolling.
The irony.
45M MAU is the DSA threshold [0]
-----------------------------
120M MAU is what XBox has [1]
116M MAU is what PSN has [2]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/531063/xbox-live-mau-num...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272639/number-of-registe...
Low-tech people often don't bother buying new computers since their phones are required for banking (BankID identification) whilst the computer is optional.
It's so genuine that it's asked in every single thread on this topic.
From the rules: do not assume astroturfing or that others are non-genuine.
That said, I wouldn't be amazed if attention is paid to consoles sooner or later, possibly bundled in with smarttvs.
This isn’t about punishing Apple.
It’s about economic opportunity for EU citizens and businesses.
The EU has a responsibility to promote the prosperity of its citizens. If that means dictating how a US company does business, then that’s what they are going to do. Which is the EUs prerogative.
As an aside, and something that is seldom mentioned, but if Apple and the other trillion dollar tech giants just paid their fair share of taxes then they may not be in this mess!
Yet they inarguably have less marketshare and a reduced role in citizens’ lives. Modern living in society necessitates some digital access to the internet. Even homeless people have smartphones. Yet all those crucial interactions are mediated by devices controlled by too few players, meaning that a couple of foreign rich companies dictate too much of what you can do and have provably and repeatedly abused that power to entrench themselves further.
Consoles are entirely different, people don’t depend on them for interacting with society.
There’s just need to be a button in the settings if the App Store itself is deleted.
https://www.ghacks.net/2024/08/07/u-s-judge-rules-that-googl...
Obviously not in America though, since we don't have a functioning government, just an executive branch that doesn't have the support of Congress, and a judicial branch that believes strongly that only an act of Congress could create the authority needed to actually rein them in. And a Congress which would ideally like to avoid doing any legislating besides passing a continuing resolution or debt ceiling bill every now and then, since there's too much fundraising work to do.
¹ At the very least more code and cases and testing where it could go wrong.
² Maybe reduced support calls?
³ Spite could be a reason.
/s
Like should we really let the 'Grandma Finds the Internet'[0] meme be the reason that you and I can't make decisions for ourselves?
Whatever cost savings that Apple has from avoiding support for these people is dwarfed by the money they make from stopping competitors to these apps from growing due to these control mechanisms.
That's the real reason apple doesn't want to do this and has to be kicked dragging and screaming by the EU.
[0] https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/Grandma-Finds-The-Internet
People who want more control over their devices; have Android. Not all solutions need fit all desires.
The public interest is served by the end users having more control over their devices than Android and Apple currently offer.
The support calls I’ve received from family since they all moved to Apple have dropped dramatically. It may not be the platform for you, but it’s the platform a lot of people prefer. This is because of the curation, not in spite of it. Infinite choice and control means an infinite potential for problems. A lot of people don’t want that. If they did, desktop Linux would be mainstream instead of a meme.
I like that open platforms exist, but I also like that other platforms exist that don’t require much effort. Rarely do those things exist in a single package. I don’t know why people, who I only assume don’t use Apple products, feel the need to change them and take away what people like.
Not being able to delete literally everything doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Especially when those apps are ones a significant number of other applications assume exist and try to interact with. Where is the line? Or is there no line? Will people try to compel Apple to keep removing stuff until iOS boots up to a prompt where the user can net boot the OS of their choice?
We can and will have the best of both worlds with open devices that are user friendly. Apple has the resources both financial and technical to make this happen. It's just a matter of regulators making them do it.
I thank the EU for pushing companies like Apple in the right direction first with USB-C, 3rd party app stores and now this.
> Will people try to compel Apple to keep removing stuff until iOS boots up to a prompt where the user can net boot the OS of their choice?
Hopefully regulators will compel Apple to open their mobile devices up the same way that their personal computers are. If I can install linux on my macbook why can't I install it on my iPhone? It doesn't affect people like your grandmother one bit.
And those people don't have to opt into the unclean world of freedom that hasn't been blessed by Apple. All your family would need to do is NOT check the box that says "Let me explore outside this walled garden", which would be accompanied with a plethora of scaremongering confirmation screens.
You can't protect people from their absolute ignorance or in that case active sabotage. And the costs to society of having our only two mobile platforms both engaging in lots of anticompetitive behavior, are huge. Not to mention that if I want any choice at all in anything I apparently have to 'choose' Android, which I don't even like to use, due to the fact that in the US (and backed up by every job I've had) companies develop the iOS version of their app with great care, and farm out the Android version to some distant contractor, and since no executive has an Android device to even try it, no one above IC level even knows their Android app is a buggy pile of trash. All of this is not even due to any inherent qualities or policies of either platform, just that rich people all buy Apple devices.
I think what makes someone a “fan” is that complete trust of Apple to do “What’s Best,” a completely coincidental perfect harmony between “What’s Best” and Apple’s financial interest, and the suggestion that the platform(s) simply aren’t “for” people like me who want any choice whatsoever, and we should just F off to Android if we don’t like it because ceding us any control would somehow explode the “safe, easy” walled garden by its very availability, a completely bogus argument.
I also note that you can install non-Apple operating systems on the latest hardware and they even put engineering time into supporting that and making it safer for Mac users to do so.
All people like me want is for there to be a switch to let us have the ultimate say over our computers. This used to be standard even on Macs until a few years ago.
I admit, however, complete ignorance on how I’m supposed to install, say, Windows, on an M* Mac. As far as I knew, the T2 security chip or whatever is the decider of that, and I wasn’t aware that Apple made any promises that they’d allow such a thing as an OS that isn’t signed with Apple’s certificates. What you’re saying is news to me so I’ll have to look it up.
Still though, I actually still mostly like “macOS” and want to keep using it, but would like to have the right to do things like turn off their dozens of permissions warnings, and assume full responsibility for not installing malware.
The problem with Windows is that Microsoft doesn’t sell an ARM installer directly to you. Here’s what the Linux situation looks like with a single command to install it:
https://asahilinux.org/fedora/
The process is described in detail here:
https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Open-OS-Ecosystem-on...
The part you’re probably most interested in is here, where they describe how the different volumes use encryption so you can boot an unsigned OS which doesn’t have access to your primary macOS storage but can use a shared volume to exchange data intentionally, and some discussion about how Apple has made this easier over time:
https://jamesb192.github.io/asahi-wiki-build/Apple-Platform-...
What is this bollocks? Slavery being illegal "reduces customer choice in the overall market". Being compelled to clean up industrial waste rather than pump it straight into the air and rivers "reduces customer choice in the overall market". Being required to be honest about financial investments "reduces customer choice in the overall market" - the market for RUBES.
The EU is not compelling Apple to remove anything, it's compelling Apple to offer their end-users the CHOICE to use third-party apps and app-stores where Apple mercilessly locked it all down for their own financial benefit - deliberately calculating what would benefit them the most.
You know who reduces customer choice? Apple. When they lock you in for their own benefit.
"I think this is all pretty simple — iBooks is going to be the only bookstore on iOS devices. We need to hold our heads high. One can read books bought elsewhere, just not buy/rent/subscribe from iOS without paying us, which we acknowledge is prohibitive for many things." https://www.macrumors.com/2020/07/31/emails-apple-blocked-ki...
...the executive wrote to Jobs about [an ad promoting cross-platform compatibility], saying that one “message that can’t be missed is that it is easy to switch from iPhone to Android. Not fun to watch.” The suit doesn’t quote Jobs' response at length, but says he wrote that Apple would “force” developers to use its payment system to lock in both developers and users on its platform. https://www.wired.com/story/4-internal-apple-emails-helped-d...
Only on HN will you see the ability to uninstall a phone app be contrasted with slavery and industrial waste.
If laws and regulations are not vigourously enforced, companies will do anything they can get away with. Including kidnapping, torture, starting wars, poisoning millions, and in this case abusing a monopoly in one area to force out competition in others and enrich themselves by depriving people of choice. Like Standard Oil before them. Do you want the robber barons back?
iPhones are almost 'idiot proof' for a lack of a better description. Allowing removal ( or rather hiding ) of the apps will 'break' that impression.
I'm surely in favour of making iPhones/IPads general computers, but that not going to happen. Those legislations from EU are no help.
The only thing I don't understand is the App Store, since today that's the place you go if you have "deleted" say, Notes or Music, and want it back. I guess they'll have to add a button in Settings or something called "Restore App Store."
And while people in general are certainly idiots and will certainly find a way to screw up, I don't think it's going to be a massive big deal to tell them "go to the App store and redownload _____" (plus whatever the way is to put the App Store back). We all know that the way to get it back isn't going to be like, SSH into the phone. Apple will have some way to do it that takes 10 seconds when people call into AppleCare, or literally the first person you see at the Apple Store will know about it.
I suspect that the number of people who are actively going to switch to a different App Store is minimal. Users can already install other browsers, even if they are still using WebView, same of messaging apps and I doubt that many would care to replace the camera app. Photos maybe, but is that really a huge lose for Apple? That saves them from storing your photos.
People on HN is often assuming that people would leave the App Store in droves, if given to option. I really don't see that happening.
But what makes most people have to switch eventually is a bank/government app that is region locked and you need it to live your life without pulling your hair out jumping through stupid hoops.
A VPN and two devices is the only way to stay truly separate from the region you live in full time over the long term.
I have been using an iPhone with a British Apple ID and the British App Store, and the UK regional settings on some devices despite not living there anymore for a couple of years now. I am fairly confident switching countries requires the user to do it consciously.
[edit] for this feature specifically, they are more aggressive: https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/7/24093437/apple-iphone-thir...
I don’t think they change anything about your accounts or device settings themselves, though.
So you can have a single iPhone with both US and UK banking apps. Same for Pixel.
The apple ID used for the app store doesn't have to be the same as the apple ID for Facetime, Messages etc. You don't even need to be signed in to the app store to use an app that's already installed.
Edit: best I could find is "no", according to techcrunch from August 2024
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/21/uks-competition-authority-...
Brexit meant leaving the EU.
It just seems so wrong to own a device, but still have the manufacturer dictate what that device is allowed to do, AND they have the ability to change those capabilities at will. It feels like buying a physical calculator, where the manufacturer can one day wave a magic wand and I lose the "divide" button. I'm generally an Apple fan and I get that people like Apple's "walled garden" but even to me this seems like an abuse.
But yes, it is silly in this specific case. I’d like someone to explain credibly why letting users delete apps is wrong. In the worst case it’s a minor pain and the user has to re-download it from the store. These apps are thin UI layers over system frameworks anyway.
That wasn't the case in a previous era. A country could make a decision that says division is illegal and ban new 4-function calculators, but all the calculators made before that would still work the same. Banned books could still be read if you already had them. Today thanks to the double-edged sword of constant connectivity, it's plausible that Apple can just add and delete features when you pass over physical borders, meaning that the set of functionality you buy is increasingly ill-defined. You don't own a phone, you just own a conditional license to the iPhone experience, which they'll tweak over time to comply with various governments on the most limited geographic scale possible while maximizing their revenue.
None of this is that shocking or interesting now that we're used to it, but it's annoying that we don't own or control the devices we buy and can't even guarantee they keep a certain feature set.
https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Filesystem:/usr/libexec/countr...
> countryd determines the user's physical country based on multiple characteristics. It is used by the eligibility system to ensure it is difficult to spoof the user's true physical location. It was introduced in iOS 16.2 and macOS 13.0.
Maybe not for long though: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/commission-sends-pr...
The solution is as Apple as it gets: Pay up.
[1] https://webkit.org/blog/15443/news-from-wwdc24-webkit-in-saf...
> Apps that are removed, such as the App Store , can be re-downloaded using an "App Installation" section in the Settings app.
Whether that's really a redownload or restore from disk cache probably doesn't matter unless the EU starts to argue that it being available with 0 latency from disk is a competitive advantage.
via a different install mechanism? How do you install Windows apps without MS store?
- The choice screen thing didn't make one lick of difference, and:
- MSIE died of completely self-inflicted wounds anyway only a few years after this.
Perhaps these two facts, though they don't prove the 'choice screen' was bad, also did nothing to establish that approach as a proven way to promote competition, so regulators weren't moved to emulate it.
(Personally, I would argue that choice screens at a point in time when one option has overwhelming mindshare are pretty pointless. Everyone will choose the dominant one by recognition, except geeks who knew how to change defaults anyway, and confused newbies who are probably the ones who realistically should be using the most 'mainstream' option anyway.)
Worst case, a box where you type in the url for an ipa (and a restriction that you must have at least one keyboard installed; although if your keyboard always crashes...)
Even worse case, use iTunes on a computer to push apps to the phone, although that imposes a requirement of access to a computer. Maybe a way to push apps between iPhones.
What happens if I have accounts in other countries and switch between them?
What if I'm an EU resident whose bank or workplace security software are sideloaded or distributed by an alt store? What if I'm traveling for longer than a month? What if, to keep banking or working, I need an updated version of said apps?
F me for being away for longer than an arbitrary amount of time that Apple thinks characterises ... what?
The Photos app has been so deeply integrated into the OS it’s almost difficult to imagine it not being there.
Not that I would mind, I recently switched to Android so I can rsync my .dng files around, thankyouverymuch.
When the US was making leaps in technological and computing advancements around the 60s, one third of Europe was under the iron curtain and its economic stagnation. The other two thirds had just about finished rebuilding their infrastructure and amenities after World War 2.
The Marshall Plan led to the establishment of very strong trade relationships between the US and Europe, and it was a time of economic boom in the US. The Cold War led to technological advancements in computing, communication, and aerospace, where the US government funded much tech the like ARPANET to stay ahead of the Soviets in all these fields.
You take a stable business environment not disrupted by world wars, a government showering businesses with free hand-me-down technologies, and a huge economic boom fuelled by a whole continent of people suddenly looking to buy your products (some of which are computers), and you get Silicon Valley just a decade later.
When Woz was tinkering on the first Apple computers with Jobs, their peers in East Germany were looking for ways to go around the Berlin Wall. The economic circumstances and business opportunities couldn't have been more different.
Believe it or not, in the 1970s and 80s when Apple and Microsoft were born, Europe didn't have many of the consumer rights protections that it has today. It was largely focused on protecting its people from the USSR. In many European countries, consumer rights came into political focus only in the last 20 or so years.
Today things are different. European Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft all exist and I believe are incorporated in Ireland. These companies do a large portion of their business in Europe. And if you consider today's tech, EU is very competitive with the US. In fintech, Revolut, Klarna and Adyen have similar user numbers as US alternatives. In AI, Google DeepMind is and has always been a UK company, and Graphcore makes NVIDIA's specialised AI chips. In the EV space, you may have heard of Volkswagen, Porsche, Land Rover, etc. In the business environment, SAP dominates ERP worldwide. And in games, you may have heard of Ubisoft, CD Projekt Red, Arkane, Playground Games, and many other European companies. The list goes on and on.
The argument that Europe didn't form Silicon Valley post WW2 because of its current consumer protection laws is inane. Or that Europe doesn't have the same FANGMAN companies that operate in the US, or that it doesn't have strong tech competitors in the global space on the scale of FANGMAN. There were much larger forces at play than being able/not able to delete the App Store in the formation and development of tech hubs around the world.
Also:
https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2023/imy-issue...
I'm not surprised though. Whenever companies are "forced" to abide by California's more stringent regulations (such as with cars), I always see Americans bitch and moan about how unfair it is. Instead of trying to improve things, some of you just don't seem to care about anything except the bottomline of some billion dollar corporation.
It's weird and disturbing.
In that vein... https://www.wfae.org/energy-environment/2024-04-12/florida-b...
Edit: I was incorrect. Booking.com, based in the EU, was added earlier this year. See below
Not true. Booking.com is also designated as a gatekeeper and is based in the Netherlands. Yeah, they're the only one, but there are only seven designated gatekeepers total.
Though I would note that Booking.com are a subsidiary of an American company, Booking.
Good point, yes. They were sold to Priceline.com in 2005 which has since renamed to Booking Holdings. However, they were founded in the Netherlands, are still based there (unlike their American parent company), and are still a major tech employer there. They’re European enough for this particular discussion.
But it’s also a token gesture. Wake me up when I can ACTUALLY sideload apps and it’s possible to use a synchronization service other than iCloud.
I can't understand why people feel the need to throw so much hate in reaction to this kind of announcement.
There isn't even the beginning of a reflection, just pure hate.
It's sad, really.
John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, is viciously anti-EU to the point he’s gone full looney.
A handful of days after Threads launched he called it “the most fun app of the year” or some nonsense, and made fun of people in the EU (this as DMA-related).
A few weeks ago I saw him compare the EU to Trump, only because some EU document had bolded words in a way he felt was haphazard.
Every time I’m faced with one his posts, the replies are now full of the “old man yells at cloud” image.
https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
...maybe too pro-consumer. Also the lack of a Google or Facebook etc is more of a result of it being harder to gain a critical mass of users. A social media company started in Poland would struggle to deal with the cultural and language differences with Holland. A more homogenous society such as the US doesn't have that issue.
Get an iPhone, only after few months enable Health permissions and one will see all the data collected before one allowed data collection. Oh, and Apple absolutely knows which country the device is used in - they base sound level warning levels on specific country's laws.
Exactly which law in the US might allow the government to require Apple to falsely state that they don't have access to certain data?
Your citation falls in the first category. I’m well aware that such laws do exist, and I alluded to some of them in my comment (e.g. National Security Letters).
But a law that allowing the government to oblige Apple to lie about whether they can access iCloud, as you said exists, would fall in the second category. This would go far beyond simply prohibiting a disclosure.
Can you identify any US law in the second category? Not only don’t I believe that such a law exists, other more ordinary laws like the FTC Act make many such lies illegal in the commercial context.
1. Apple tells users that they don't snoop on iCloud data, and sprinkles this marketing statement by assuring users that they are literally incapable of doing so.
2. US government lawfully forces Apple to gather and share intelligence, with an adjacent gag order. Apple changes a few settings on their backed and issues updates to to iPhones, along with publicly disclosed changes. Apple - as any business wishing to still exist in a year (or the management wishing to keep their seats) - complies with government's demands to the letter.
3. Gag order literally renders Apple and any person aware, [edit: s/incapable/disallowed/] of stating "we started logging this data" or "we have not been logging this data in the past, but..."
4. Apple logs and shares data, has to lie to customers to abide the law.
In particular, it does not prevent them from removing any such invalidated statement from their website, although it's possible they'd have to do that removal as part of a broader overhaul of the relevant page to prevent it from being effectively a disclosure by obvious minimal page diff.
To me, a government being able to compel silence from / prohibit disclosure by a private company or person feels much less awful than a government being able to force them to say something false.
Those are not even in the same category of acceptability for me. The second one is pretty much never acceptable; the first one sometimes is, though of course not always.
I think the other commenter was saying that US law allows the government to oblige Apple in the second way, in other words to affirmatively make false statements. I was saying it does not and probably constitutionally cannot. That seems like a clear disagreement to me.
They and I are, however, agreeing that US law allows the government to compel Apple to keep silent about certain things. This includes not disclosing that certain prior statements which may have been true at the time have subsequently become false.
Its not moved out of device without permission.
> They are obligated to release the data when requested
They don't own the keys on both ends. They are not obligated to have backdoors either.