This is one thing that I genuinely have never understood: if it's this challenging (and effectively impossible for non tech savvy users) to make android devices safe / private / secure and also feature-complete - why, oh why are so many people still using them? This is not me fanboying Apple, it's just sort of mind boggling to me.
This is from someone who used a nexus 6p for two years, and some older stuff before that - but who has recently switched back to iPhone for its ease of use and privacy stance.
Coming back to iOS from Android can be painful - there's too much "you're holding it wrong" mentality in the platform and its UX. If your use cases fit the design, everything's great. The moment they don't, it's extremely frustrating.
(This is very similar to Windows vs macOS, by the way.)
Indeed! I find that the degree of customizability that Windows allows to be more than sufficient for my needs; but I have no doubt that there are people who have different needs that are not accommodated.
If you think it's "challenging" to use Android devices without Google, you should try using your iPhone without Apple. At least with Android you have the option of installing a custom ROM based on AOSP with no Google services.
I think that's a very good point. Also, the vast majority of Android users doesn't mind the tight integration with Google in the first place and among the minority that does, there are only very few people with the technical expertise to change anything about it. So most people end up surrendering themselves to Google because 1) they don't see any other option and 2) it's also the most convenient "solution".
The hard part is de-coupling yourself from Google services, if you rely on them. That may be solved via self-hosted services. See: https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted