I suppose if both you and the recipient have cloud backups disabled, then Apple can no longer view your messages.

But outside of that scenario, is there any advantage to iMessage using e2ee instead of just regular TLS?

Edit: Apparently it's up to you whether you want your iCloud backups to use e2ee. There's an account setting: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651. Standard protection is a sensible default for regular who aren't tech-savvy, as with e2ee they're at risk of losing all their iCloud data if they lose their key.

That's an old article. According to Apple docs, Advanced Data Protection covers Device and Messages backups, which means they are E2EE.

Are there any stats as to the percentage of iPhone users that enable Advanced Data Protection? Defaults matter a lot, and I wouldn't be surprised if that number is (well) below 10%.

If you are the only person out of all the people you correspond with who has ADP enabled, then everyone you correspond with is uploading the plaintext of your messages to Apple.

The number is well well below 1%. I would bet six figure sums it is below 0.1%.

Effectively nobody has it on. 99%+ of users aren’t even aware of the feature’s existence.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/12/05/icloud-advanced...

You have to remember that there are something like a billion+ iOS users out there. 100 million people have not written down their 27 character alphanumeric account recovery key.

Correct, but nobody turns it on because it’s opt in, and even if you turn it on, 100% of your iMessages will still be escrowed in a form readable to Apple due to the fact that the other ends of your iMessage conversations won’t have ADP enabled because it’s off by default.

Again, Apple gets to say “we have e2ee, any user who wants it can turn it on” and the FBI gets to read 100% of the texts in the country unimpeded.

If Apple really wanted to promote privacy, they’d have deployed the so-called “trust circle” system they designed and implemented which allowed a quorum of trusted contacts to use their own keys to allow you to recover your account e2ee keys without Apple being able to access it, rolled that out, and then slowly migrated their entire user base over to e2ee backups.

They have not, and they will not, because that will compromise the surveillance backdoor, and get them regulated upon, or worse. The current administration has already shown that they are willing to impose insanely steep tariffs on the iPhone.

You can’t fight city hall, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, etc. The US intelligence community has a heart attack gun. Tim Apple does not.

Separately it is an interesting aside that Apple’s 1A rights are being violated here by the presumptive retaliation should they publish such a migration feature (software code being protected speech).

And yet, it's somehow so effective that it's illegal in the UK because it doesn't let the government read everyone's messages.

TBF, governments trying to outlaw some kind of privacy doesn't necessarily mean it's a current impediment to them. They can be planning ahead, securing their position, or just trying to move the window of what is considered acceptable.

The same applies to WhatsApp. Messages backups are unencrypted by default and even the whole iPhone backup includes the unencrypted chat history of WhatsApp by default. One reason why it was a big deal for UK to disable iCloud’s E2EE backup.