That is exactly it. Apple is not good at privacy, they are good at giving you the sense of it. A closed source OS, on proprietary hardware, where they don't even give you root access to your own device, will never be private. You pay them, but really they own the phone and you have to trust them.
But they are obviously very good at making you /feel/ secure and private.
Now tell me what serious alternative there is for a modern smartphone? Firefox and Ubuntu have abondoned their phone OS, and they had no good working system that could compete with Android or iOS? Windows Phone? How's that better than Apple's offering?
Apple seems to have the best arguments here.
You could try jolla or fairphone or even a blackphone (or one of the governmental only privacy oriented smartphones not available to the general public).
But this is somewhat irrelevant as having a smartphone with a GSM chip is a severe privacy issue in itself whatever the hardware/OS. Even a simple mobile phone is a privacy liability unless you take some precautionary measures.
To get some privacy one has to accept to have less comfort and ease of use, privacy and security are a tradeoff. something only a few actually do.
You can use a free version of Android? Yeah! You are going to lack some stuff tho. Google Play Services provides geolocation services, the app store, push notifications,...
Android is more open than iOS but it’s not really open enough to make a significant difference, not for 99% of users and not really for the 1% that think it is more secure or private because they run a (heavily modified, very old, probably abandoned by the manufacturer) Linux kernel but ignore the baseband and closed source camera driver.
Even the FLOSS nature of AOSP has been questioned for years, but as a manufacturer it's impossible to offer a phone with AOSP, to be able to use android you have to include the Gapps.
Google has slowly been moving functional parts from AOSP to Gapps, the point being to limit the AOSP part and eventually get rid it of the open source part.
And no: AOSP is Android. It's like saying that Linux is not Linux unless you bundle it with GNU-utils and wrapped by Canonical.
1. Privacy of information
2. Freedom to inspect, modify and change source code.
So Open != automatic privacy of information.
The question then really boils down to do you trust apple to be doing what they say they are doing? Or would you prefer to verify it yourself? (open source)
I think Apple is betting that point 1 is much more important than point 2. More people also care about it. Hence the strategy.
Actually the more I think about it the more i realize this may be apples master stroke strategy. Google, Facebook etc. business models are primarily based around monetizing your personal data. Where as apple is saying you can have the same level of services but with out having to compromise as much of your data.
Apple is actually uniquely positioned for this strategy, since the do not need to sell your data to companies. They make their money of the devices.
It's probably one of the reasons google has been moving to more and more devices. To neutralize the Apple threat.
A device can be perfectly respectful of your privacy despite being closed and proprietary.
The only difference (IMO) between open and closed platform is that with the former you can have 3rd parties inspect it.
However, unless you have the resources to fully audit an open platform (either yourself, or by paying someone else) I believe you should assume the worst from both open and proprietary platforms.
Which does not mean that open source is synonymous of privacy either, only that one can go further than blind trust to the manufacturer.
As another example, Telegram claims to be the most secure messaging app out there. They have open-sourced their code, but what really matters is what they do with peoples' data on their servers.
> They're not going to open source their entire web infrastructure.
I think blockchain can actually solve this problem once and for all. When data is stored in decentralized nodes, much of these concerns are gone.
Personally I do not trust them and for this reason I have no data plan and no internet on my phone.
Nothing in your reply counters Apple being good at privacy. Source availability is related to privacy in your own personal opinion.
If you would like to audit each line of source code your phone will run, that is fine, most do not. Personally I like to have it both ways by regularly cracking open various components of iOS in a disassembled (ARM assembly is just as good as source code to some folks).
Total security is not possible, not at least by a long shot.
Although, I understand your concern about why people trust these companies. While I don't know the answer just yet, I think one reason is that most these companies are located in Western countries where "rule of law" is considered extremely crucial. Openness about balance-sheets, government policies, and privacy are - to the best of my knowledge - critical in the US.