I don't think that's even remotely comparable to the fragmentation problems Android has where you're lucky to get even 2 years of security updates with some providers
This doesn't make sense on any level. What subset of the infosec community actually believes this? Teenagers hiding porn from their parents?
Android spews to X Google domains with pinned certs, so we can't MITM to see what's going on.
Apple is perceived to value security and privacy, due to prior postures and public statements that Apple doesnt work with terrori... FBI. But we only have their word.
The only thing that doesn't spit and spew is a hardened install of Linux.
All are terrible, except Linux. We know what it's doing.
Using a specific Android like distribution is not a magic bullet and will not solve all your security problems.
Unless the phone is flashed with LineageOS[0], it will phone home data to Google nonstop and beacon out its presence to hackers 24/7. To make matters worse, there is a huge fragmentation problem with Android and some phones are disallowed from updating to the latest Android version. The same goes for iOS; a user can often be locked into using the same iOS version and cant upgrade to the latest version (a huge security hole)
[0] https://www.lineageos.org/