The amusing thing is how much flack Apple received early on for their closed product approach.
It's arguable that Google traded heavily on the relative freedom of the Android platform, and sucked in a lot of early adopter / tinkerer types on the promise of openness. Kind of ironic that for most people, most of the time, the open source nature of Android is now barely a historical footnote.
I was a bit of an outlier in that I generally appreciated Apple's walled garden approach because it severely limited the amount of crapware/malware in the app store.
Plus - certainly 5-6 years ago - because of that whole product attitude, when you used an iPhone it simply felt a lot more polished than contemporary Android devices: I haven't really used Android enough recently to comment on whether or not that's still the case.
Certainly not for those tinkerer types. Often it's the tinkerer types who are concerned about privacy, and it's those types who install Copperhead OS or XPrivacy, which allows you to deny exactly this kind of thing. Not only that, but it'll let you block all those smaller ways of spying - like unique device IDs being phoned home to 6 different ad, analytics and crash handling services that the silly game you just installed uses.
It's hard for me to imagine using a phone on which I see ads, especially on YouTube, can't background apps like SSH clients, syncthing, even direct IMAP and SIP connections used to be a struggle for people on iOS (still may be?) or run app that Google/Apple have decided are evil piracy tools, like a manga reader or a torrent client manager and search tool. I have friends who even run emulators and use memory editors to cheat at mobile games regularly on their phones... very, very different models. Android is just a lot more flexible for a tinkerer to this day. All this is possible without exploits on most devices, allowed and accepted by many manufacturers.
There's this weird attitude on HN I see frequently where it seems like everything has to be "for the masses" for it to be of any value - tinkering by definition is not for the masses. Android devices probably shouldn't be for the masses, but for tinkerers, they really do pack a respectable punch in my opinion.
But even then I think you're still massively overstating it. 6-10 years ago nearly everyone in my circle of geeky friends and colleagues had a root-kitted Android (Cyanogenmod or similar) or a jailbroken iPhone. Today that number is exactly zero.
I know many older people for whom an iPad is the first "computer" they've ever owned, and for them it's a lifeline to grandchildren and community. These are people who were never going to learn MacOS or Windows.
True, it's a bit of a fight to go full open source on android, but in recent months this got easier.
Many apps that replace the whole google apps suite have been updated to be a great alternative, sometimes better.
Also F-Droid got a nice look and functionality now, don't miss the Play store a bit.
In case someone does, there is the "yalp-app", google play backwards. It downloads apks from the play store with a fake account.
It's arguable that Google traded heavily on the relative freedom of the Android platform, and sucked in a lot of early adopter / tinkerer types on the promise of openness. Kind of ironic that for most people, most of the time, the open source nature of Android is now barely a historical footnote.