I genuinely believe that in 2015 Apple had the balls to resist and today they don't.

I am judging by a simple fact, that "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries, and in some it's behind a KYC. I have a strong opinion that this is insane. And once they let the foot in the door - there is no closing it.

Apple is surely resisting, but there's a limit to how far they're willing to go. They won't risk losing the entire EU market, for example. Or the Chinese market.

The UK is a minor footnote. They can afford to lose it if push came to shove, but for now they're willing to make conciliatory gestures.

Even in 2015 Apple put in backdoors. They have been really good at making people believe things that are not true. E.g. from the linked post:

iCloud already protects sensitive categories of data (like Passwords, Health data, Messages in iCloud, etc) with end-to-end encryption by default.

Except that there is a footnote in Apple's security document where they confirm that Messages in iCloud is not end-to-end encrypted if you don't enable ADP and have iCloud Backup enabled (which is probably most users):

Standard data protection: When iCloud Backup is enabled, the keys to your backups are secured in Apple data centers. If you use both iCloud Backup and Messages in iCloud, your backup includes a copy of the Messages in iCloud encryption key to help you recover your data.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

So, there is always a backup of Messages in iCloud accessible to Apple and thus (US?) law enforcement, unless you enable ADP and the people you communicate with also use ADP.

WhatsApp is similar by the way. Unless you enable E2E backups, they end up in iCloud/Google Drive backups and are only encrypted at rest. Of the major messengers, I think only Signal completely opts out of iCloud backups and have their own real E2E-encrypted backups.

Even most technical people I talk to do not know this and don't have ADP enabled.

There are a lot of weak defaults like that.

They never did. they had the balls to resist against western governments, where it was politically adventagous to do so. They folded to China real quick, because they wanted to make sales. All "icloud storage" in china has been on another storage platform, that follows all the local laws.

Apple routinely removes VPNs and other apps from App Store in Russia even though they supposedly left the market in 2022.

They obvioualy never ever resisted anything except its a good PR stunt.

> "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries

Not quite.

The request to confirm age is there, but actually completing it isn't mandatory (though granted, it does leave an 'alert' thingy on your phone settings saying you haven't finished setting it up).

Is it required to KYC in those countries?

I'm generally okay with "how old are you?" without KYC and changeable later. It just allows apps and websites to display age-appropriate content.

I doubt that with the speed of thought dramatically increasing due to AI, that the door will stay closed just because it's being closed now. That decision will be revisited.