The UK government have already shown they are categorically incapable of enacting any of their tech laws. The flaw is always in the premise and when you trace it back to the source you’ll find only incredulous luddites and Teresa May bulk buying chastity belts.

No there’s teeth to this law. They have to wait for the government to “review” the change before it can be deployed. And the government can order them not to make the change.

The guardrails are basically “if it might hamper intelligence or police work, we can reject it”.

As an example Apple has been doing foundation work that will likely lead to photos having similar protection to passwords. Photos are obviously incredibly valuable for spooks and cops since most photos have location metadata and face recognition.

They could easily reject that change.

If it were me, I would just send them an all release notes for every product all the time. I’m sure that it shouldn’t be up to Apple to decide what does and doesn’t count as interference.

That’s how the UK is framing it, “oh, it doesn’t give us the power to block anything, Apple is just over reacting”.

They already have the power to block things from the Investigatory Powers Act 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016

From the OP’s article:

The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA) actually implemented many of the proposed powers, including granting the government the power to issue orders to tech companies to break encryption by building backdoors into their products. Apple strongly objected to this at the time.

So with this, they would now have the advance notice needed to actually block updates where before Apple could just release an update and by then it was too late for the UK to do anything about.

This doesn’t have anything to do with Brexit.

As the article says, it was first put forward in 2006 and parts of it became law in 2016.