Remember the case in July when it emerged that the UK might have to block iMessage and FaceTime?

First published August 24.

Updated, September 6, 17:50:

The UK has chosen not to implement the law meaning Apple has pulled iMessage from the country, at least for now. The Financial Times reported that authorities did not want to introduce new regulations until it was “technically possible”.

What is England doing?

“Apple is highly skeptical of the potential for a new law in the UK that would require Apple to install a backdoor so that authorities in the country could peer into criminals’ iPhones. If they choose to do something like this, Apple said they would have no choice but to discontinue iMessage and FaceTime,” we wrote about the country’s somewhat strange security measures at the time, but it didn’t stop there.

For now, the country is proposing just that security updates need to be approved by authorities before being launched by the company to protect users’ devices:

“Device manufacturers will also likely have to notify authorities before providing critical security updates that fix known vulnerabilities and secure devices. “Therefore, the Secretary of State, upon receipt of prior notification, may now require operators to, for example, refrain from closing security gaps to enable authorities to maintain access for surveillance purposes,” Just Security explained.

“Exploitation of our e-services does not rule out the possibility”

As noted by Just Security, the problem is that British authorities want access to the device’s security flaws to “monitor criminals.” If Google or Apple fixes the hole, they will no longer have access to the potential criminals they are investigating.

Not only is the security issue so big that customers may have to wait for the government to have a secure iPhone or Android, but manufacturers will have to rewrite their apps from scratch, as exemplified here by Meta’s move to E2E encryption:

“We quickly realized that the transition to E2EE would be a very complex and challenging engineering puzzle. We had to rewrite almost the entire messaging and conversation codebase from scratch.”