As fas as I'm aware, Apple is the only one working against even involuntary cooperation by making sure that they can't break device encryption by not keeping any keys or access to any keys.
If that is true, I can understand why Snowden praised Apple. Let's be honest about encryption technologies -- they are fickle and difficult even for people who are immersed in technology. For people who aren't tech savvy at all, encryption technologies are 1) not even known or thought about and 2) almost impossible to implement.
As an exemple, look at GPG email encryption. Once you get the whole public key / private key thing, it isn't that hard, but, getting to that point is actually very difficult for most people. Then there are ongoing issues with usage, keys going out of date or weird stuff happening making things produced in one system not readable in another -- just a bunch of administrative crap most people don't want to deal with -- they just want to send a text or an email and get done what they have to get done.
So if Apple can make that seamless, AND Apple cannot play man in the middle and decrypt it -- that is a huge win, one which other companies will surely follow. Things are getting slowly easier in the aftermarket. TextSecure (Android) and Signal (IOS), makes encrypted texting pretty seamless, but most people aren't even aware of these ( https://whispersystems.org/ ). They just use the default texting app on their phone. If that default app did secure encryption by default, that's a good thing.