You can atleast remove the googleware to a great degree, you can't do the same for iPhones easily.

Huge difference. You have fdroid, apk slicer and alternative stores without google gate-keeping. You can reflash your phone with ungoogled android or open source alternative gapps package. Use microG to sandbox google stuff.

There are ton of ways to contain googleware.

Which of those do you think are accessible to the average user?

All of them if someone else does the initial set up, from first hand experience.

What about updates or when something goes wrong?

Does google provide you support when something otherwise go wrong? No. Unless of course it's a pixel.

And I have a custom rom which gets update every month. Ungoogled. :)

The comparison you should be making isn't with Google, but Apple.

My experience with custom ROMs was unfortunately a lot worse than yours. I had the original Galaxy Note, and picking a custom ROM for that was a "Updated, has features, doesn't kill your battery - pick 2" kind of deal.

Not too different from MS not being first line support for your Thinkpad, but offering more for surface laptops.

I'm still under update coverage for my Pixel 2XL, haven't felt compelled to upgrade at all. i do wish more handsets supported using Lineage or another open variant/option for after coverage expires at least.

For updates, you hit the update button. When something goes wrong, same as others.

You can still use the google play store and switch email, maps, and browser and give almost no data to google and anyone can install apps in google play.

I use LineageOS without the google play (/media) services, which is the first huge step, then I also use as much from F-Droid as possible.

Google is very strong in the data heavy areas. GMail, Calendar and especially GBoard and are extremely hard to replace, as are YouTube and Translate.

Your privacy has much more to do with the apps you use than the phone itself. Apple doesn't collect user data like Google, but the difference between them is 1 company.

If you have an iPhone and you use Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Microsoft Office, Google Photos/Docs, Spotify, the Dominos Pizza app, etc etc there are half a dozen companies holding your private information either way. If you want to go total lockdown, get an iPhone with a VPN and never use any social media or cloud apps, but don't pretend like having an iPhone alone is some huge change to your privacy problems.

You can have access to the google play store and browse with firefox, use fastmail for email, use maps.me for maps, and text messaging + a million and one different messaging apps.

Then google knows what? That you installed fastmail, firefox, and maps.me?

If you have Google Play Services embedded into your system and you use Google Play: Yes. You have a good chance of avoiding that by downloading through Aurora, though.

I must say I never understood why Apple is supposed to be any guarantee of privacy?

If you are technically minded, you can easily flash LineageOS + microg on your phone a use a virtually surveillance-free phone (as far as you can, ignoring stuff like cell tower tracking and opaque baseband, etc).