I do think it's a lot better than the situation on Android phones. At least changing the default search engine is relatively easy on iOS (I've changed all my personal devices over to duckduckgo).
I want to have my own choice of search engine than Google/Yahoo/Bing/DuckDuckGo. I can't on iOS, I must choose from the 4 options and cannot supply my own.
Specifically: I want to use Yandex as an Australian.