No one can explain the confidential-NDA internal workings of Apple in this forum, but here’s a constructed, plausible, scenario that contradicts the claim “Appl

No one can explain the confidential-NDA internal workings of Apple in this forum, but here’s a constructed, plausible, scenario that contradicts the claim “Apple implemented this for China”: If Apple was planning to release this in a point release of iOS 16, and then the Chinese government asked them to do something, then they could have said: “We have a feature in testing that we’d planned to ship later this cycle, so we’ll push that up and soft launch it in China first and then roll it out worldwide once any bugs are hammered out.” This constructed example both satisfies the condition “why China first?” and also contradicts the assertion “it is certain that Apple implemented this at China’s request”. It is not known whether or not, and to what degree, that Apple considered and/or acted upon a request from China. (It is also very unlikely that China requested this “after 10 minutes” option specifically. China would rather not have unmonitored peer-to-peer communications, and Apple tends to include temporary timers in their UI for RF/GPS features.)