iOS is a very buggy operating system; they polish the hell out of the top of it, but its internals are hairy and scary. That first paragraph doesn't represent a security bug, but its adjacent to many other, more serious problems iOS has had. Its about once every-other year we get some wild bug where a complete stranger can text you a specially crafted string of unicode characters and it crashes the entire OS.
It isn't fair or accurate to say that Android is less secure than iOS in 2024. They both have problems, and both will continue to have problems, but both are significantly more secure than they were 10 years ago, and its very rare for applications downloaded from their respective official app stores to do significant damage to the user. The correct lens through which to view this policy change is: It was a program which exclusively worked with "major applications", and this kind of program is a responsibility which these major applications should take on, not Google.
Essentially anything for x will crash it: “”:x
If you went back farther, you would find exploits that compromise your iOS device simply by receiving a compromised jpg image, not even by you opening the message. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/apple-patches-clickl...
I think the expectation in 2024 should simply be 0 day exploits are available for purchase that target both platforms, neither is secure.
[1] https://bgr.com/tech/the-most-sophisticated-iphone-attack-ev...