I used to love my Windows smartphone and still miss it. At the time of replacement, I chose iPhone over Android for number of reasons.
One is that I don't use Google, or Apple cloud for that matter, or at least as little as possible. In the case of iPhone, it's pretty much forced on me by Google being the default search engine for Siri and Safari, that nearly impossible to change. With the Android, tracking is pretty much built-in to the non-open source part of the OS.
The other is that in iOS, there seems to be more control to disable tracking. In addition, most, if not all "features" can be disabled. I do miss Siri during driving to read and respond to my text, but it's disabled on my iPhone 8 Plus. For browsing, that I seldom do on the iPhone, there's DDG browser that I wish could be made the default. Nor do I use many apps, the exceptions are NOAAH weather and Navionics apps for my boating needs. Even these can be controlled what they have access to on my iPhone and I do restrict them as much as possible without impacting their operations.
Any anonymous data can be reversed to identify the subject, I have little doubt about that; especially, when one registers the device via an account with the company. In addition, even if the that's not the case...
Forcing end users to use Google as the default search engine for $3B a year, without possibility to changing it, is ethically questionable. In my view, it would be fine, if Apple would provide an easy way to change the default search engines, but it cannot. It's probably part of the contract with with Google. Didn't Steve Job stated something along the line of destrying Google, when he made Bing the default search engine?
No, Apple may not track you, but Google certainly will. Google has three billion reasons to do that. And it's been paying off for Google, since it generates more income from Apple devices, than it does from the Android devices.
PS: Yes, the iPhone 8 Plus 256MB is too much for my needs and in retrospect, I should have selected the iPhone SE. Unfortunately, my eyesight isn't as good as it used to be and needed a larger screen...
