>>Comparing that to scorched earth installations of windowses is like comparing gentle massage with bludgeon on the head.

LOL

Meanwhile I'm about to purchase a Chinese replacement for my Samsung Note phone. The Note has lovely hardware, but Samsung recently caught the "our stuff only works if we can access your contacts, communications, images and GPS data" disease. Even the health app to count my daily steps now needs to see what I write to my wife or it can't work. Never mind that it was perfectly capable of counting steps for over a year before they discovered it needs all this stuff to work; you can fool all the people all the time so of course it needs access to all this stuff.

As the Chinese alternative comes with its own set of concerns, in time I expect a defiant alternative ecosystem will rise up as Linux once did for Windows. But not yet widely available- and meanwhile Apple's monopoly OS on its devices is still celebrated by most of its users.