The FBIs motives have always been nakedly transparent in this case. They had no interest in the specific phone, they wanted to use it as a wedge issue to force

The FBIs motives have always been nakedly transparent in this case. They had no interest in the specific phone, they wanted to use it as a wedge issue to force a precedent. Once they figured out this avenue was a bust, they withdrew to find a different angle. Since everything is classified anyway, it's irrelevant if they actually cracked the phone or not but if they did, it was probably by buying an exploit from the NSA TAO store [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog