Not necessarily snake oil
At least not for the examples above like someone wanting to use a phone as a bug.
In such a case, the greater the variety (PINs versus passwords, Android vs iOS) the better, as you only have to compromise the weakest link. In that big meeting, me sitting there with my iPhone that has always used a password since I bought a 3gs might take a donkey's age to brute force, but that's no problem if the guy next to me was an easier mark.
The FBI will continue to whine because some phones will be protected by passwords, and they still believe they deserve a backdoor and don't believe they should have to pay third parties for equipment to let them hack (some) phones.
Of course this is irrelevant for spy agencies, since this requires physical access. If they had physical access they'd take my phone apart, add some tiny little microphone the size of a grain of rice (the iPhone X is packed pretty tight, but there's probably room somewhere) that will record everything around me for a few days and then they can get close enough to me (maybe sit next to me while I'm in a restaurant) to command it to download the contents to them.