Don’t use Android... do use Gmail?
It's not about avoiding Google. Google does excellent security work. It's about using the most secure products in each category. An Android phone can be made asymptotically as secure as an iPhone, but only by an expert.
But: if it helps put a dumb argument to rest, consider that in the populations being trained, "Android phone" means "phone from an insane variety of vendors, most of whom are not competent to sell or maintain a secure phone".
While Google is certainly a threat for those of us who value privacy, this is a different issue than being persistently targeted by resourced hackers.
Also, Google are one of the more secure email providers, they spend a fairly significant amount of resources towards researching and defending against resource rich state actors. This combined with how seemless they’ve made hardware based 2 factor work with their products makes them one of the better options for anyone who will be persistently targeted like a journalist. And anyone with a threat model similar to a journalist will be using u2f if they have any technical sense whatsoever.
Has anyone been able to log in using a Yubikey and Firefox to Google? Because I haven't.
Yes, this works ever since Google introduced new accounts page. Tested with Firefox on Windows and Linux.