alt Hacker NewsChina is quite a bit worse. Not having an Apple or Google account in the US would be kind of inconvenient. Not having WeChat Pay or AliPay in China means you can't buy stuff most places. They've ensured that their de-facto-mandatory services are domestic, but they're a lot more mandatory.
I assume the Chinese government is quite happy with this, because they have no trouble bringing their large companies to heel, unlike the US. And centralizing payments like this gives them a great deal of information and control.
The US also has no trouble bringing their large companies into line.
Apple willingly preserves a backdoor in the e2ee of iMessage for the FBI et al in the form of effectively unencrypted iCloud Backups.
The whole “Apple won’t decrypt stuff for the FBI” narrative is farce.
Post Snowden, all the tech CEOs met in person with Obama to do damage control, as they all had some serious credibility problems once the reality of FAA702 (warrantless one click direct access, aka PRISM, aka the #1 source for the IC) came to light.