> You can pretty much do anything with Android, the same cannot be said about Apple's dictatorship.
The problem is that app developers can also do anything with Android, often against the users‘ will.
Before I switched to iPhone, my choices for location access on Android apps were basically “access location 24/7”, or “no location support at all”; and even that was an improvement upon the earlier “the app will get these permissions, don’t install it if you disagree” model. iPhone, in contrast, had a sensible “only access location when the app is open” option. Similarly, uploading a single photo to Facebook on Android required the app to get full access to your whole SD card; on iPhone, I can send a photo without the app getting access to my storage at all (that single photo is copied into the Facebook sandbox by the OS). Perhaps Android has improved since, but so has iOS (see e.g. the feature list for iOS 14).
For some of us, controlling our data without turning the phone into a full-time hobby is more important than having full system access.
> I am not even sure about stock installs given Apple's poor security record.
Do you have a link supporting that Apple’s security record is worse than other systems, relative to market share?
As far as I know, the macOS permission system provides better sandboxing than either Windows or Linux by default. (Though if you work for it, you can harden Linux more.)
And although there is a lot of malware for macOS, last I checked nearly all of it was in the form of Trojans and similar vectors, where a user has to download and execute untrusted code. That is an issue on any platform; a user running a malicious bash-script with sudo shouldn’t count the same as remote exploits in my opinion.
The problem is that app developers can also do anything with Android, often against the users‘ will.
Before I switched to iPhone, my choices for location access on Android apps were basically “access location 24/7”, or “no location support at all”; and even that was an improvement upon the earlier “the app will get these permissions, don’t install it if you disagree” model. iPhone, in contrast, had a sensible “only access location when the app is open” option. Similarly, uploading a single photo to Facebook on Android required the app to get full access to your whole SD card; on iPhone, I can send a photo without the app getting access to my storage at all (that single photo is copied into the Facebook sandbox by the OS). Perhaps Android has improved since, but so has iOS (see e.g. the feature list for iOS 14).
For some of us, controlling our data without turning the phone into a full-time hobby is more important than having full system access.
> I am not even sure about stock installs given Apple's poor security record.
Do you have a link supporting that Apple’s security record is worse than other systems, relative to market share?
As far as I know, the macOS permission system provides better sandboxing than either Windows or Linux by default. (Though if you work for it, you can harden Linux more.)
And although there is a lot of malware for macOS, last I checked nearly all of it was in the form of Trojans and similar vectors, where a user has to download and execute untrusted code. That is an issue on any platform; a user running a malicious bash-script with sudo shouldn’t count the same as remote exploits in my opinion.