Apple is actually far worse at protecting your privacy than Google.
On iOS, you cannot install any apps without an Apple Account, and even some preinstalled apps (like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand, iMovie) cannot be used before you assign them to an Apple Account.
On Android, you can install any app from any third-party store without having any accounts. There's a store called Aurora Store that even lets you install apps from Google's Play Store without an account as well, so, you can even install all the mainstream apps, all without any accounts.
What do you mean by your data being protected by vast amounts of encryption? Can you verify those claims beyond trusting what Apple tells you? Isn’t the commenter above insinuating that a targeted individual can be compromised anyway?
If iPhones had flaws in the encryption or security, they WOULD be exploited and monetised.
A zero day remote attack on an iOS device is worth so much money that you have to be _really_ ethical as a hacker not to sell it and report it to Apple for a small reward instead.
The last time one was deployed "publicly" was against Jeff Bezos (or his wife) - one of the top10 richest people in the world anyway. And then it was patched for everyone.
Apple is the only one that effectively knows the Real Name of all their users, because you cannot do anything on an iOS device without signing up for an Apple Account first.
It's virtually impossible to sideload anything on an iOS device without extensive developer know-how; but for Apple itself to do a targetted attack, would be a trivial task.
Android is the privacy heaven by comparison.
It's relatively trivial to get started with F-Droid and Aurora Store, and then you can install whichever apps you need, without providing any identifying information system-wide, without needing anything beyond the Android device itself.
No PCs, no mandatory 0days, no exploits, no specific software/hardware requirements, no warez, no copyright infringement, just pure free software and a few warning dialogues from Google about the dangers of installing the third-party apps, before you can do whatever you wish with the hardware you paid for, on any Android device of any vendor.
The difference is the open source software is auditable - Apple necessarily isn't. Its not the same.
Its not a user interface problem either, that's just a lame excuse. iMessage is end to end encrypted and is arguably one of the most pleasant to use messengers.
Apple is very explicitly and deliberately building their systems to forcibly collect massive amounts of user data that they can and do provide to the federal government.
While it is true that close to all companies will comply with lawful orders (but not EVERY company, FWIW: Lavabit famously shut down instead of handing over SSL keys to feds), it is possible to design systems in such a way as to protect FAR more user data privacy than Apple does. Case in point: review the contents of Signal's subpoena response a few years ago:
This isn't a sham privacy claim like the kind made by Apple that requires you to trust the provider, either. Signal's clients are famously open source - something Apple does not do for pretty much any part of iOS or Mac OS:
Additionally, most of the Signal server's source code (nix the anti-spam components) is open source, as well as the libsignal library used across the clients and server alike:
Apple could be this transparent if they wanted to. They choose not to be, because the truth is, they do not actually care about user privacy, they are constantly collecting massive amounts of telemetry, user data, and user metadata from every single device they make, and they have been proven to share this data extensively with the federal government via the Snowden leaks, even in spite of the few actions they take publicly to maintain the marketing illusion of being a company that cares about user privacy, such as in the wake of the San Bernardino shooting.
Why is Apple taking the harder route then? Like having Maps go through proxies and get the route in small bits so that Apple's servers don't know who is going where, for example?
Meanwhile Google is giving you notifications about "would you like to review <this exact tiny shop you were just in>", because they are the good guys?
The TSA performs security theater, where they take the harder route, yet fail to even detect, let alone stop 95%+ of yesterday's threats, to say nothing of today's or tomorrow's threats:
As for the deeper why: it's more important to the US government for passengers to feel safe than it is for passengers to actually be truly safe.
Likewise, it's more profitable for Apple to make its customers feel their data is private than it is for Apple to make their customers data actually be truly private.
Apple is not privacy-preserving company.
Apple is marketed as a privacy-preserving company.
No, an iOS 0day _is_ less valuable. Every exploit acquisition program pays out more for an Android RCE than it does for an iOS RCE. And it's not surprising: give iMessage a mean look and a .png that looks funny and it breaks under the pressure.
The rest of the thread above is merely the delusions of an Apple fanboy, followed by dozens of people listing out reasons why an iPhone is more vulnerable to attacks, both from external actors _and_ from Apple collecting massive amounts of data and having total remote control of "your" device.
> On Android, you can install any app from any third-party store without having any accounts. There's a store called Aurora Store that even lets you install apps from golgle's Pay Store without an account as well.
I thought Google recently announced changes to this requiring a developer account to side load.
Yes, Google did announce of the plans, but those changes aren't active yet, and they plan to start enforcing them in only several APAC countries where sideloading is far too popular and gets abused far too much.
Hopefully, they'll see just how ineffective their measures are, and abandon before applying the plans to the rest of the world.
> where sideloading is far too popular and gets abused far too much.
Why do we consider user installation of software abuse? Plenty of people install software from non-play repositories simply to prevent Google from getting data about their app profile.
The issue I spoke of, is not by the user, but by the fraudsters tricking people into installing malicious apps.
I disagree that such protections (at the expense of the power users) are necessary, but, OTOH, you cannot just ignore such issue existing in the first place, because it does exist, and Google already does have the tools to combat it (by scanning all apps regardless of origin, and blocking malicious ones).
The unspoken part is, now that the functionality exists, it will be rolled out in more and more countries because it allows governments to directly control what apps users have access to. My response to Chat Control in the EU, if all efforts to stop it were to fail, was always "well, I have an Android, so I'll just install whatever app that isn't backdoored". But if Chat Control passes, this exact functionality will eventually be used to ensure that I can only use backdoored apps.
There is no way to abuse it "too much". In fact there is no way to abuse it at all. "Sideloading software" means "installing software on my own damn machine". You can't abuse installing software on your own machine.
That is indeed one area of privacy but I wouldn’t say that Apple is far worse. There is countless number of examples where this just simply isn’t true.
Also regarding the App Store, you don’t have to enter a credit card, you can make an account with a new email address.
What's worse than the inability to NOT have a permanent standardised real-name identifier on your device at all times and on all devices?
Apple has really questionable security as well. There's lots of people who have reported Apple randomly asking for Apple Account passwords all of a sudden in popups, on both iOS and macOS, the same way as malware would; or forcing password resets every day or every week.
BTW, do you know how many customer accounts did Apple terminate in 2024? It's 128'961'839 — nearly 129 million customer accounts terminated in just one year.
On iOS, you cannot install any apps without an Apple Account, and even some preinstalled apps (like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand, iMovie) cannot be used before you assign them to an Apple Account.
On Android, you can install any app from any third-party store without having any accounts. There's a store called Aurora Store that even lets you install apps from Google's Play Store without an account as well, so, you can even install all the mainstream apps, all without any accounts.