I don't think Apple does "fine grained controls"

For the specific context of privacy, they have had more fine-grained controls than Android since the inception of the appstore, until release of Android 6.0 where Android AFAIK has caught up.

Almost, but still not. There’s still no way to revoke android.permission.INTERNET

And if you revoke any permission to any Google apps, all of them will refuse to do shit, and you can’t even place calls without giving Google access to your location, body sensors, bluetooth, etc.

It’s one setting thinking about it: “Track me and make my search results more accurate”.

You have to understand that search engine is not a reflection of what people search. It's about searching the 'web'.

Apple can just acquire DuckDuckGo.

Isn't that just mostly using major search engine indexes? I know DDG some of its own indexing, but how much do they really do on their own? I don't see the benefit of getting DDG for them when they'll have to deal with the major search engines providing most of the data anyway.