If you had a third party android device that made it, if those eyes were compromised you would have passive tracking of that individual. Consider that for a dissident in an authoritarian country.
It's not a "can Apple design a protocol that does that?" but rather "if the device was compromised what would be the implications?"
Apple is perfectly willing to forego privacy and security if an authoritarian country demands it, see China for the most well known example.
If a user trusts Google with their phone (and likely their location history and other such data) then I don't see why Apple's customers would care if Google would be able to track them. The American government already asks Google for all devices in the vicinity of a crime, it's not like someone's headphones won't be found another way.
Any hardware token storage can be compromised, pretending Apple's chips made in China are any different from Qualcom's chips made in China in that regard is useless.
I don't believe for a second that nation state spying is even remotely related to Apple deciding to cripple their products if you use them together with something they didn't make.
With Apple devices and the Secure Enclave ( https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secure-enclave-sec5... ), even Apple doesn't have the back doors to open it up and retrieve the keys from an arbitrary device.
If you had a third party android device that made it, if those eyes were compromised you would have passive tracking of that individual. Consider that for a dissident in an authoritarian country.
It's not a "can Apple design a protocol that does that?" but rather "if the device was compromised what would be the implications?"