I believe they and their employees think they are the good guys. They want their customers to think they are. That they are the most privacy focused company.

They have done the research and know that people care about privacy. And that it’s imperative to accrue market share via this method. With more and more devices coming online each year.

They go to quite extreme lengths to portray that their solutions are private, to prevent other corporations from accessing their users data, whilst caving to pressures that circumvent those measures for legislators and perhaps more importantly themselves. I think they are better than most, but I also think we can expect much higher standards from Apple.

The simple fact is that to get to the position they are in, they have had to make some compromises, they have had to implement tiered or hidden access. They would not have been able to sell their devices in China without it, or to be the darling of the U.S. stock market without making deals/concessions with regulators. And I think we’re starting to get wind of the fact they have retained backdoors for sometime. In spite of the journalists not doing much journalistic stuff these days, the truth is starting to come out and the layers are being peeled back.

Overall I just think they are too big now, to be trusted. But I also see Bitcoin devs using google docs or Zoom for videoconferencing to collaborate and that’s certainly lower hanging fruit than expecting all those devs to migrate off Apple devices.