Is Apple any better on this? I'm thinking that my next phone is going to be an iPhone because of the regular updates over Android, but is it as hard to stay away from iCloud and not accidentally send everything there?
From my experience, iOS rather asks twice than not at all. I have yet to detect a sharing feature where the intentions are not clear. Also, every privacy related access is prompted separately, a freshly installed app has no permissions on anything - so it's usually a non issue when installing apps.
There is absolutely no need to use iCloud with your iPhone and the settings page allows very fine grained selection of what should be synced through iCloud. I also have yet to find a 3rd party app that activates syncing through iCloud (of its content) automatically, this is generally all opt-in.
