Whereas the article says: "The first allegation is that “the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence”. This makes no sense at all. The app does not show the locations of individual officers at all. It shows general concentrations of police units, with a significant lag. As the developer and @charlesmok, a Hong Kong legislator, have pointed out, the app aggregates reports from Telegram, Facebook and other sources. It beggars belief that a campaign to target individual officers would use a world-readable crowdsourcing format like this."
It could be incompetence, but it seems much more like clear disingenuousness, which is a pretty common thing nowadays.
You can't just precede anything with "just playing devil's advocate for a moment" and make it immune from scrutiny, that's the intellectual equivalent of "just a prank". From the WP article, emphasis mine:
> explore the thought further using a valid reasoning
I also don't think that Cook's claims are extraordinary or at all difficult to believe, so perhaps that's the more fundamental disagreement you and I have.
IMHO it is far more likely that a representative from the mentioned Hong Kong government agency reached out to ask the app to be removed for the reasons given, and Apple complied with their request. If I'm correct, Apple is taking the supplied information at face value and also as a formal (legal) request.
In that light, the reason for the (internal) statement here is due to the press this app already received and because many employees of Apple have a humanitarian interest in Hong Kong - or even have friends and family who live there.
The complaint is that Cook's claims are extraordinary and seemingly impossible on their face because of the fundamental nature of the app in question. Its purpose is to show the aggregated position of large concentrations of police, so as to let users avoid confrontations with them. How can such an app be used to "target individual officers for violence", since it provides no information about individual officers?
When so extraordinary a claim is made, hearsay evidence isn't the issue. What is necessary is an explanation of how the seemingly impossible is possible. Cook does not provide this or even address the apparent problem. A neutral person, reading Cook's memo without the proper background, might be mislead into believing the app in question does provide tracking of individual police officers. I don't accept this is an accident on Cook's part. I think he is deliberately attempting to mislead his own employees regarding the nature of the app, and as a consequence his decision to ban it.
Cook's cited but unenumerated "credible" information received from a government body and users only compounds the situation. Cook could provide plenty of additional material to support his claim. He could provide more detailed information on exactly what information was received, in what volume, and in what form. He could explain the efforts the company undertook to perform independent corroboration of the evidence. He could provide a detailed account of why, in this case, he believes an autocratic government currently conducting a brutal repression of its own citizens can be trusted to communicate honestly about it, given neither it, nor any similar autocratic government, has ever spoken honestly about similar situations in the past.
Fundamentally, the problem isn't whatever evidence does or does not exist. It is that Cook's memo is a weak, politician's attempt to justify a misdeed by making absurd claims for which he provides no evidence at all. He is trying to make a problem go away, not engage with a difficult situation as a human being.