They decisively said “this was a bad idea” and disavowed the effort.

Things change, especially when the Gov says they must. It’s already been a few years. Given the “Apple in China” precedent I wouldn’t be so optimistic.

My understanding is that Apple openly declares they have the same encryption standards in China, and that iCloud Advanced Data Protection was one of the things that started getting them on China’s “naughty list” again.

Their argument was that ”with this you don’t need to ban encryption”, and they tried to prevent that regulation.

Look what we got…

I am sure that no single implementation is as sophisticated as Apple had.