I don't think anyone in Germany would misunderstand. Warranty is known so well here, most electronics stores try to upsell you on a warranty extension provided by a third party insurance company.
I think in such cases the 'burden of proof' is fairly light. There is no easy way I could have caused the discoloring, except if the phone became wet (this was before iPhones were water resistant) and they could easily see this with the water indicator strip.
Yeah, I didn't miss that part. The fact that their warranty doesn't replace the legal consumer protection rights is not a concession in any way.
For the 2-year guarantee defined by EU-law (which you described very well) they brush you off to the trader who sold you the item as this is the liable party by law.
In case of other manufacturers, the trader (i.e. a mobile carrier) didn't accept such conditions and required the manufacturer to provide a warranty covering the full 2 years in order to sell his goods. So the 2 years of legal guarantee became 2 years of warranty. In case of Apple this extension didn't happen, instead a joint business of selling insurance for the second year was created.
So if your device-fault would be covered and you didn't buy insurance, the trader is double-incentivized to NOT support you in the second year (you should learn to have bought insurance AND he can't forward the claim to Apple).
A trader like a mobile carrier or Apple itself keeps pushing consumers back for years and only settles when a lawsuit is raised and actually moves to court (as they want to avoid a ruling, and the issue goes away with just ~1000EUR).
Source: I worked in that space when the EU extended from 1 to 2 years. And my Spouse works in a Consumer Protection Agency (particularly the iPhone 5c is a legend in those realms...)
> Die Garantie gilt zusätzlich zu den durch Verbraucherschutzgesetze gewährten Rechten.
"The warranty is in addition to your legal rights."
It's a bit sneaky: Apple makes it sound as if you're only covered by Apples warranty, but those are different things: Apple provides a separate warranty on top of your legal rights and it may cover slightly different things. You still retain all of your legal rights.
There's a catch with the 2 year warranty by law though: It only covers defects that were present in the device when it was purchased - either manufacturing or design. In the first 12 month, the default assumption is that the device was broken when purchased and the burden of proving otherwise is on the vendor. For month 12-24, the burden of proving that a device was defect at the time of purchase is on the buyer. In practice, this means that for most cases, even the legal warranty is limited to 12 month, because that proof is hard in most cases.