Devil's Advocate (meaning I don't agree with this, in fact I disagree with it, but I don't see this argument being made anywhere and think it would be interesting. If you're one of the people who are offended by this practice of people steel-manning "the other side" and only want to read comments that affirm your position, please don't read this comment).

Question: Wouldn't it be better for Apple to build a UK-only encryption that is backdoored but is at least better than nothing? If Apple really cared about people's privacy, why just abandon them?

My position: No because this is a war, not a battle. Creating a backdoored encryption would immediately trigger every government on the planet passing laws banning use of non-back-doored encryption, which would ultimately lead us to a much, much worse world. Refusing to do it is the right thing IMHO.