Ngl, when I first glanced at this pic, my mind thought they were churros.

That’s precisely what it is.

You are. Google gives you 15GB because making ad money based off your data is their business model.

Guess you should just switch to Google then. And rage when they, too, charge you for cloud storage matching your phone. Because cloud storage costs money.

You’re not doing anything that optimized charging won’t do better for you

They bought dark sky for the API and that's pretty much it. They don't want to maintain two weather apps, especially one that wasn't made with their design principles in mind.

Not defending the decision, just relaying the (very likely) philosophy.

They don't even need to call. There are services out there that thieves can use to send a text to a victim whose iPhone has been stolen (obviously, after they've replaced it or are using a temporary phone).

The text purports to be from Apple, saying "we've located your iPhone!" and then directs them to click a link to a fake web page asking for their Apple ID and password. Once the thieves have that, they can log into the real iCloud page and remove activation lock on the phone.

Your friend should change her iCloud password ASAP.

Here's an article that describes it in more detail.

In general, any time you misplace your phone or it's stolen, you should NEVER directly click on links sent to you via text message that claim to be from Apple. To try and track your phone, you should manually navigate to iCloud.com and log in that way.

Whether Apple needs to say anything depends on who you want to believe. Who here is more credible: A multi billion dollar company who had the FBI sue them to get into an iPhone owned by domestic terrorists and they still told the FBI to go pound sand, or a police department on another continent with unknown technical skill who has an agenda on account of being extremely pressured by the public to turn up some leads on the death of a famous actress, when they could’ve more easily pulled that data from other sources?

She maye have been phished but someone claiming to be Apple. It’s a common thing for iPhone thefts.

1. You can’t always believe what law enforcement states publicly. It could be a ruse to make potential suspects nervous. It could also be the person putting out that info is misinformed about how the data was obtained.
2. The device could have had an easy to guess passcode. Or the iOS version was out of date and a zero-day exploit was used to get in. In which case it’s unlikely Apple was the one doing the unlocking (see #1).
3. Apple CAN access iCloud data backups and provide that to law enforcement if they follow legal procedures (unless Advanced data protection is activated… and that feature isn’t even available yet in india where OP is based). iCloud backups can contain photos, documents, data that apps have stored, e-mails, and copies of text messages.
4. Some info, like broad location data, call logs and (possibly) any cached, non-iMessage SMS texts, can be obtained by the cellular network provider, and Apple has no say in that (again, see #1)

My question: I don’t know anything about this case, but, unless the victim’s mother and sister are also missing, why didn’t they just get copies of those chats and logs from the mother and sister’s phones?

Edit: she committed suicide, and the mother apparently claims her co-star on the show she was working on aided in the suicide. Which only further reinforces my question here. It seems like the police claim to have broken into an iPhone to obtain data they could’ve more easily gotten elsewhere, which seems awful fishy.

It’s also not (yet) available in India, where OP’s post is taking place.

The on-device encryption standard for iOS devices in India are no different from the ones anywhere else. If the OS is up to date, and the phone is locked with an unknown passcode, then Apple can’t get into it, in the U.S., India, anywhere.

Having said this: For now, it IS possible in India for Apple to obtain any data backed up in iCloud, if law enforcement follows whatever legal procedures are in place. Advantaged Data Protection (in which Apple “throws away” its copy of the encryption key), is not a feature that exists there yet. This is probably what they’re referring to here.