> whereas I don't see much evidence that's the case for Apple products

https://www.barrons.com/articles/apples-advertising-business...

I don’t see what the issue is, unless Apple is violating my privacy to serve their ads.

(I’m not a fan of ads, but don’t see how this is necessarily a privacy issue)

Well there's the disingenuous way in which they present the choice, defaulted to opt in with flowery language, versus the popup third party developers have presented to their users.

There's also the "app store health card" which the cynic in me would say is designed to scare people away from "competing" apps, because none of the Apple equivalents have a health card. Additionally there's no nuance - both iMessage and Twitter ask for location data - but only if you want to share your location. End result? People looking at Twitter in the App Store surmise "well, they must be tracking my location at all times!".

> none of the Apple equivalents have a health card.

Apple's apps on the App Store most certainly do have health cards. Not sure what you've been looking at...?

Built in apps - iMessage. And yes, that does seem to be in the app store now, however, there's a lot there that seems to be missing - access to photos for example isn't listed in the health card, neither is microphone access - both of which are core features of the app.

Are they?

It looks like the way it's implemented, access to photos comes through a Photos extension to iMessage (I think I recall these being called "iMessage apps"?), rather than it being inherent to the app.

And options for the microphone similarly seem to belong either to the extensions, or to the system—which handles microphone input as a substitute for typing.

It's possible you're right, and I'm missing something, but that's how it appears to me.

Is that available to other apps? If not - then this just looks like they're skirting around things they foist on third party developers to make themselves look squeaky clean.

I don't know the details, but I know that third-party apps can add iMessage apps. And the microphone input to replace/supplement the keyboard is a systemwide thing, working on any(?) text input.

The microphone access is also for voice messages, which are supported by other messaging apps, but again, has to be listed in the health card - and looks nefarious.

> I don’t see what the issue is, unless Apple is violating my privacy to serve their ads.

Google also claims they don't violate our privacy by hiding our data from third party advertisers. They still collect massive amounts of data ...

Ads that rely on tracking is a problem for privacy, not all ads.