The closed/open/free/freedom paradox of Apple is something people should be thinking more about:
They are in many ways the most closed of all the big tech companies. Their flagship platform (in revenue terms), iOS, is the most closed general purpose computing platform in history. Overall it's second only to things like game consoles for being locked down to everyone including the owner.
They are also the platform and OS that offers the best privacy and security to the average user, and the only mainstream platform/OS actively pushing back in any way against surveillance capitalism.
Why is this? Three reasons I think, listed in order of importance:
(1) Economics: Apple's closed premium brand gives them pricing power, causing the majority of their revenue to come directly from their users. This makes it at least economically possible for Apple to prioritize their users' privacy and security at the expense of other potential secondhand sources of revenue. If you're playing in the bargain bin or worse are "free" then you must seek revenue elsewhere, and monetizing users via surveillance and other scummy methods is the easiest and most lucrative way to do that.
(2) Security: being unbelievably locked down is a double edged sword: it robs users of choice, but also robs malware and adware of attack vectors. Android is more open and as a result is a spyware disaster and seems to be getting worse. There's so much un-policed attack surface that Android's permissions don't really mean very much.
(3) Corporate DNA: Apple still has some DNA left over from the personal computing era back when PCs were about empowering users rather than monetizing them and the Internet was supposed to be about communication rather than manipulation. Apple still thinks it's making products for people, not productizing people.