In the article it says they’re cancelling the “pro” version to focus on producing a cheaper version. So it sounds like you might get what you want, although “cheaper” will still likely be very expensive, and your point about compatibility with non-Apple devices still holds.

It looks suspiciously like a pay-for-award company that gives out awards to just about any product for parents/educators/related to children or parenting, as long as you pay the “application fee” (although they specifically say an award isn’t guaranteed).

I mean looking at their website they seem to give out an awful lot of awards, and they mention that for $500, you’ll get to use their award seal on your product and receive 100 award stickers, and for $1,500 you get more stickers, plus they’ll post about your product on their website.

Call me crazy, but I’d think that if an award isn’t guaranteed, they’d make you pay for the initial application to start with, and then (assuming you “win” an award) they’d offer to promote your product for an additional payment, once they’ve decided that you’re eligible. The fact that they talk so openly about how paying a larger application fee gets you promoted on their site (and some other stuff) makes it seem suspiciously like a pay-for-award scheme to me.

Well that’s clearly because parachutes aren’t effective at reducing the likelihood of causing serious injuries or death. There’s even a randomised controlled trial published in the BMJ that says so: https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

I’m not the person you responded to, but the Assistance and Access Act 2018 is probably a good place to start. Here is a page from the Aus Government about it, but the very short version is that the government can ask tech providers to assist them with building capabilities into their systems to allow the government to access data to help with the investigation of certain crimes. In some cases these will be voluntary requests, in other cases they will be requests that must be fulfilled, including asking providers to add capabilities that the government has developed.

There’s a lot more detail about it, and the government insists that they won’t ask providers to create systematic weaknesses or to decrypt communications entirely, but it’s not clear to me exactly how those ideas are actually implemented. Unfortunately, much of the process (likely the entire process) is not made public, so as far as I’m aware there aren’t any good examples of requests that the government has made and what sorts of things have or haven’t been implemented.