Imagine working on a team in Apple and waking up to the news that the ACLU is now criticizing your work. Talk about being on the wrong side of history. Do Apple employees even care anymore? Or are they just there for the resume prestige? The mental gymnastics you must be doing in this moment to keep yourself from feeling cognitive dissonance.
Not everyone views the ACLU's word as sacred and authoritative. I certainly don't, even though I think they're correct on this particular issue - it is in fact bad that Apple can arbitrarily cut off apps from iOS device users by removing them from the app store because the US federal government tells them to. It's also bad if they can do this because the Chinese federal government tells me to, or because Apple decides internally that some app is bad. This is a huge reason why I have never used iOS devices. Nonetheless, people were willing to work at Apple, on iOS devices, going back to the dawn of the system in 2007. If they didn't care about end-user compute sovereignty then, they probably don't care now either.
Obviously not everyone view's the ACLU's word as sacred and authoritative. For example, I imagine Nazis, Slave Owners, and Product Managers on the App Store team at Apple would not.
