Apple really is in a unique position. However their are a few areas in which they drastically lack and TBH it is not App privacy disclosure - everyone knows Facebook is physically, mentally, and spiritually bad /s
I was quite anti-Apple for a long time on the basis of it being a luxury brand that restricts the freedom of its users.
But it recent years as phone performance has become less of an issue meaning Apple's older phone models are basically just as good as mid-tier current year Android, the luxury label is not as extreme.
Additionally the M1 launch which basically transformed their 'real' computer laptop from being overpriced and literally hot garbage - to the best* dollar for dollar mobile machines.
So basically Apple has the hardware and software polished and at a great value but they have a very integrated ecosystem which means a single flaw breaks the whole cohesion.
Primarily, E2E encryption is broken by design because iCloud backup are not E2E and you can't know if any message recipient has iCloud enabled. Sure you could just use Signal/Matrix/etc but it breaks the cohesion - does your Apple watch get Matrix notification with the same polish as iMessage?
Also iMessage is also still iOS only right? Which is just insane. For a time Blackberry messenger was the best thing but it didn't last partly because it was vendor locked.
Whild I can ignore limits of phone OS's for the sake of security; MacOS is sort of anti-user to the point that third party projects like Homebrew work day & night to fix the ecosystem. Luckily now Nix(OS) on Darwin is an option for a more complete ecosystem but it is still other people fixing Apple's mistakes for free which is just unbearable.
Considering Microsoft runs Github which I believe Hombebrew and NisOS still both use extensively and I believe they do so for free or very cheaply(?) In any case, Apple seems like a poor steward of open source compared to other FAANGM(?) companies... maybe I am wrong but the G, M, & F seem more active than the Apple. Apple did just kill/abandon CUPs etc.
Again, I would just like to be wrong. Maybe you can already use Linux with Apple devices very well and maybe turning off iMessage and iCloud solves the E2E problem. But it just seems like Apple is 90% of the way there but refuses to do the last 10%.
I guess what I mean to say is Apple has some real problems to fix of its own before it should critize other apps even more. For instance, does iMessage come with a warning about broken/nerfed E2E? Or that mobile Safari has an anti-user and anti-standards implementation of PWAs (again last I check)?