I am waiting for someone at Apple[1] to explain why I can't set any arbitrary site as my search provider on mobile on the phone that I paid for.
(Does Chrome on mobile allow it? I use Edge on iOS which also only has a hardcoded list, so while I don't know for sure, but I assume not)
[1] no doubt i will be waiting until i am dead
I'm guessing that apple wants to get paid for placement in the preferred search provider listing.
[delayed]
Yes Firefox does, you just need to visit it once and it's in the list. You can also add it manually if you want. I used it that way both on desktop and android.
However, Google has shat the bed, itself, the room the bed is in, the neighbors and half of the city with the search. Since search no longer returns any semblance of relevant data, but ads and wrong AI summaries.
So for vast majority of use cases I find Kagi much more superior. And in 1 or 2 cases when I'm frustrated with the results I can append `g!` before the query to get the shitty Google results.
The only downside: Apple doesn't let you set a custom search engine to Kagi. And (a very unpleasant surprise for me) neither does Firefox. You need extensions.