The FBI was allowed to force Apple Inc to produce code to allow them to brute force the encryption on the iOS 9 Apple iPhone belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook.
What Apple now will have to do is to mount the encrypted partitions of the phone under a custom version of the iOS 9 operating system, which disables the brute force and other additional protections offered by the current software.
Could the Apple iOS 9 encryption be easily broken?
It is not the encryption itself that is broken, that would be difficult, it is the password or pass-phrase that decrypts the partition that is broken.
The recent court order obtained by the FBI forces Apple to disable the failed password count, which will allow the FBI to more easily guess, many trillions of times, what the device password is. Of course if the writer could mount the iOS 9 partition and brute force the key, one would assume that almost any country on the planet could do exactly the same thing.
So basically the USA and other Governments do not need the assistance of Apple to break into the iPhone, but one assumes that the court order obtained by the FBI has been done to preserve the evidence trail.