This kind of reasoning is applied everywhere, all the time. It seems the majority opinion is that the "bannable" property of a tool depends on the ratio of good vs. evil usage of the tool, with time weakening the effect of evil.

So a tool that's mostly used for evil shortly after it's created is worthy of a ban (e. g. 8chan [1], Gab). But a tool which started with a more favorable ratio and slowly drifted into mostly evil-use territory (e.g. Tor, prepaid phones) isn't seen as being inherently evil and thus gets a pass. Tools that are overwhelmingly used for good will even have negative bannability (they will be actively protected and a ban will be seen as an offense) regardless of them being sometimes used for particularly evil purposes (e.g. Google, Twitter, cash).

In the present case, HKmap.live is mostly used by protesters (good usage as seen from an HN crowd PoV), so Apple's decision is seen as unjust here. But had it been mostly used by criminals early on, the consensus opinion would certainly be different.

There's a lesson for app builders: if your tool is vulnerable to bans by centralized/mob entities, it's especially important to attract enough good usage (as judged by the enforcer) early on in the history of your service.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20616055

Exactly, by that account, they should remove encryption on iMessage so that police can access it.

I'm actually quite surprised that iMessage has seemingly flown under the radar in authoritarian countries for this long…maybe nobody uses it there?

People only use it because it's enabled by default and takes over from SMS with minimal intervention. There's no point using it when there's also WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal/etc. The competition are largely cross-platform. I'm surprised Apple even bothered to make it in the first place. They could have saved themselves the effort and not got into that market, rather than making an app that makes them look bad.

How does it make them look bad? In any case when it was developed WhatsApp was still early days (and supposed to eventually charge fees), and neither Messenger nor the others existed. It succeeded well enough that in very iPhone-heavy markets WhatsApp never really became a thing.

iMessage is successful as in it makes Android users look bad. It extends and overtakes the SMS standard in such a way that anyone not in the circle appears to be disfunctional. A lock-in situation passing as the new normal for uninformed Apple users.

Green Bubbles: How Apple Quietly Gets iPhone Users To Hate Android Users https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150211/05455029985/green...

I think a better distinction is between what an app allows and what it facilitates.

Could you give an example of when the distinction matters?

Importantly, it also applies to anonymous AirDrop, which is heavily used by Hong Kong protesters. Will Apple disable that too?