Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and will replace Android as soon as a viable alternative is presented One alternative that's been around for a while you might like if you want to continue using smart mobile devices is an operating system made by Apple (not Google), called iOS (used to be called iPhone OS but it can now be used on tablets too even some music players like iPods have it). Just throwing that out there, they have a lot of similar feat…
The OP seems concerned about privacy. Apple certainly has a lot of PR activity promoting privacy of their products. But at the same time it seems so many websites, apps, companies, ISPs, etc. are hoping to track their users much more than before. Perhaps even sell profiles on their users to advertisers or other tech companies. Apple also seems to be a fairly secretive company. Their products have historically felt mo…
Doesn't seem that way. Consider the flak Apple took for standing up for users' rights with the whole Bernardino incident.
And here's a specific example I read about a while ago. When you're using Google Maps, your device is directly identifiable in Google's servers all the time by a unique identification token. When using Apple Maps, your iPhone generates a new token every ~15 minutes and uses that to report position. There is no connection between any two tokens other than location proximity, making it much more difficult to track users directly from Apple's end. (I'd give a source but I'm on mobile, but I think I read about it on Apple's website around a year ago.)
> And if they aren't, shouldn't they be, from a business perspective?
Well, if their business was selling customer data then yeah. But their business is selling cool devices with cool software. Yes, collecting all that data would make some things a lot easier — ever wonder why Siri doesn't work as well as Google Assistant for a lot of people? — but Apple appears to care about privacy and security enough that they don't engage in these tactics. And... they seem to be doing okay despite it, so I don't think they mind the hit to their piggy banks.