Here’s how I think about it:
Google’s business model involves advertising to you, tracking your activity, mining your data, and selling that information to other entities while also using it to advertise to you more. It’s their main profit-driver. You are the product.
Apple’s business model is to sell you the hardware, give you the software and make it (mostly) depend on the services to keep you locked in. You (the user) are not the product, their devices and services are.
Of the two, which is the lesser evil?
Normies are not going to fully convert to Linux phones and open-source software any time soon. In the meantime as far as privacy is concerned, Apple can do much worse and Google can do much better.
I’m not going to argue this point, but am more interested in discussing issues they currently have than issues we think they’ll have eventually. If we’re gonna vilify a company let’s make sure we’re doing it based on stuff that’s actually happened so we know they deserve it.
To be fair, a lot of those features have been getting added back, a lot of walled-garden regressions removed as well. I guess this part is more subjective and based on your workflow. The feature churn itself is the only true constant.