> Unless Apple is straight up lying about their technology and encryption methods

Which, to be clear, is perfectly possible. Apple has denied the existence of a deliberately backdoored system at least once before: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

  Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government “prohibited” the company “from sharing any information,” but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will “detail these kinds of requests” in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.