> I associate democracy with choice and Apple isn't really too active in that domain.
I was using "democracy" here to refer specifically to political influence of a citizen (or citizenry in the aggregate) over a state. "Democracy-enhancing" thus means "enabling or easing participation in acts of democracy" or "protecting the individual from things that would prevent them from participating in acts of democracy" (where "acts of democracy" are things like votes, campaigns, debates, referendums, demonstrations, and any associated acts of evangelism/recruitment toward those activities — basically anything listed in the "Ways citizens can participate" list here: https://www.civiced.org/resources/curriculum/lesson-plans/45...)
Most communications technologies are democracy-enhancing, even when they are actively surveilled by a state actor, since there are always some democratic acts that the state either doesn't really care about, or doesn't know how to watch for. But, of course, non-surveillable communications technologies are more democracy-enhancing.
> But in practice government would have more difficulties to include backdoors in Android for example
Note that the Chinese intelligence apparatus need not actually put any backdoors into individual Android devices, nor put any backdoors into upstream Android as an OS. They just need to request that Chinese OEMs like Huawei backdoor their own Android distributions, and then let the state shoulder-surf the results; while also helping the OEMs out with funding for PR campaigns that encourage the use of domestic OEM brands over foreign OEM brands. The government doesn't even need any developers to do this; just money and strongly-worded letters!