> For those more expert than I, is Apple any better in this regard?
Yes, and unequivocally so. Apple is not know to track browsing behavior, search terms, etc. Most of the data that your phone collects about you either remains in your phone (that’s why they’ve been shipping with NPUs for several years - they do A lot of machine learning in device rather than in-cloud) or is analyzed using differential privacy mechanisms.
The amount of data that Apple refuses to collect in Apple Maps for example is astounding. Start and end points of any journey are not used for example. Your trip is broken up into a bunch of segments, and only the middle ones are analyzed for traffic pattern, and even then only after being anonymized.
And most of the details behind all of this are published in a well written and frequently updated privacy whitepapers.
You ignored iCloud though, which isn't E2E reencode and uploads personal photos, contacts, location and some other data to Apple. They can decrypt this data and regularly share it with the governments.
So your post is kinda misleading when you leave these details out - it creates a false sense of safety.
(And before someone complains: Yes, Apple is infinitely better at privacy than Xiaomi. We still shouldn't hide privacy risks though.)
However, there is an elephant in the room - any Xiaomi device can unlock its bootloader, and the flash an open firmware, like LOS. This instantly makes it much better than Apple phones or any phones on the market - you can even ignore google software. With Apple you cant even run apps that haven't gotten through Apple censors, and the closest you can get to owning your hardware is "jailbreaking" it.
a) iCloud doesn’t upload location data, b) it’s completely optional, and c) I was answering a question, not giving a dissertation on Apple’s privacy practices (which I fairly well actually qualified to do).
If not, which mobile is ideal?