You had me with you until the last paragraph. I appreciate my ARM device. In my case an iphone. Out of all if the other ‘brands’ Apple comparatively has my best interests (privacy and security) in mind.
Your best interests are not necessarily everyone's best interests, security at the expense of freedom is not mine or many other people's best interest.
Security/privacy and freedom are at odds these days. Freedom means the freedom to install malware and spyware and the freedom for said malware and spyware to run wild on the device.
Android is more free than iOS, which means Android apps are much more free to spy on me.
If you are technical enough and conscientious enough to avoid this problem that's great, but that's not the majority of the market. For most users freedom means malware and highly invasive surveillance.
The Internet and the computing ecosystem decades ago was comparatively open and free. Then the barbarians came in the form of surveillance capitalism and industrialized malware operations. Now the fields are salted, the smaller settlements are burned to cinders, and everyone is cowering behind the high city walls of various walled gardens.
Much of the security afforded by systems without too much market share is that they are not seen as a juicy enough target. But any juicy target in the hands of a regular user (not an enthusiast, not an expert sysadmin) will be exploited. The more flexibility the user has, the bigger the chances they will pick convenience over security making the system even easier to exploit.
There's no system that will make everyone happy so the interests of the many for security outweighed he interests of the few for tinkerability.
Maybe I'm an outlier in this, but I don't think Linux is for everybody, nor do I think it has any reason to try to be. Linux phones should be an option for enthusiasts and security researchers, IMO. At no point did I intend to imply that they were some sort of answer to the issue of security and privacy for the majority of people.
If anything I thought my comment implied the opposite, since the community is so heavily DIY that it's comparatively a Robinson Crusoe scenario.
>Android is more free than iOS, which means Android apps are much more free to spy on me.
I'm curious about this, does this mean the ios app equivalent of facebook and every other service that's been caught spying on customers, somehow doesn't do exactly the same thing on that platform?
If I use facebook on an Apple device I become immune to their tracking?
As much as folks like to hate on Google here, Android's privacy protections / permissions are on par with iOS and improve with every release. Each has their advantages, but its not far off.
With some of the mentioned trade-offs of course.