Yea I don't get the argument of "Just don't use Apple"
You can like the hardware and not care for the software. It really is A/B at the moment. It's difficult for the average user to choose C. You either allow Google to peer into your life, or trust that Apple's marketing isn't a gimmick and a lot of Apple is e2e encrypted.
From what I read, iCloud backups are finally getting e2e encryption. I see this as the biggest reason to stick with Apple. I trade off full-customizability for better security/experience.
If a jailbreak was available for my iPhone, I'd be on it though.
> From what I read, iCloud backups are finally getting e2e encryption.
Yes, but only as secure as the passphrase you use to unlock your phone. Except actually less secure than that; your phone will rate limit attempts to guess your passphrase, but encrypted iCloud backups turned over to a government won't and can't rate limit attempts.
For the average user with a relatively short passphrase, iCloud backups will be trivial to crack. Still, it's an improvement.
You seem to think that your phone's pin is used directly as some sort of encryption key for cloud backups, but that's not how these systems work. Your pin or face or fingerprint unlocks your phone's secure element, and the secure element contains a randomly generated high entropy encryption key for your data.
This is why you can casually change your pin code in your phone's settings without it chewing through your battery and data plan reencrypting and reuploading gigabytes of cloud data.
In addition to what DCKing said, you can effectively rate-limit password attempts on encrypted data by deriving the key using a cryptographic hashing function such as bcrypt with a high amount of iterations.
What does full-featured mean to you? There’s a bunch of non-google Android distros that seem full featured to me. Same with Sailfish, at least when I last used it some years ago.
No big corporate support, less commercial apps packaged by default, but that’s a feature in itself.
To me, full-featured means that I can install a ridesharing app, social media/chat apps, a podcast app, a maps app with live traffic updates and turn-by-turn directions, and popular streaming music and video apps.
Bonus points for supporting contactless payments, banking apps, and airline apps.
The hardware should have decent battery life and get great cell reception, and the UI should be smooth.
"Simply not buy Apple things" means "buy Google things." There's no way around that if you want a functional smart phone. You either pick red or blue.
If there were 5-10 full-featured phone OSes out there, your point would make more sense to me.