Took me some time

Do it now rather than waiting even longer and amassing even more personal data on device

This is what allowed Temu and Alibaba and Wish and the like to happen (their business model was to send every single product as a single package worth under 800$, leading to enormous shipping times and waste etc., but they don’t have to pay import taxes).

You’re right that default Android found on nearly all smartphones today is not that much better than iOS. There is the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) however, which means the base of Android is free and open source and therefore allows for lore privacy focused versions of Android to exist such as LineageOS, Graphene OS, Calyx OS or /e/ OS. This isn’t possible at all with Apple’s iOS and one can therefore even claim it to be worse than Android in that sense.