Meanwhile the contact list on my dumbphone is perfectly safe. Time and again that's been proven to be the right decision, convenience seems to trump security in the eyes of many but I just don't want to give this up until there is a 'cloud free' smartphone.
It doesn't say anything about other companies, it just says that Apple doesn't give two shits about relationships with security researchers, despite their massive resources and wealth even when smaller or FOSS teams do much better. Apple are the king of user experience which made them insanely wealthy but that's about it. In every other respect they are anti-consumer, anti-developer, anti-reparability, anti-researcher, anti-openness, anti-standardization AF and act like major a-holes in general to anyone outside their org who isn't a customer.
It's not that Apple can't be better on the other fronts if they actually wanted to, it's that they actively choose not to be, as that has no impact on their stock price or consumer experience and in consequence to their executive pay. So why do things differently if people still buy your products?
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if the "Apple is more secure and has less vulnerabilities" moniker just stems form researchers getting tired of dealing with Apple's BS of not acknowledging or paying them, so instead they just keep quiet and sell the 0-days they find on the exploit markets (hard working honest researchers still need to eat and pay rent) only for those exploits to later end up in the hands of shady companies like NSO or nation states, therefore leading to no news in the mainstream media about Apple related vulnerabilities. Win-win for Apple I guess.
It doesn't say absolutely anything abut other companies. It just says that Apple doesn't take security nearly as seriously as their Marketing and Sales department would want us to believe.