I've been an Android user since 2010 (and an iPhone user since 2016). There's always been an anti-Apple sentiment in the Android community. To be fair, this is almost entirely the fault of Steve Jobs, who swore he would wage "thermonuclear war" on Android, that he would bankrupt Apple to "right this wrong" and called Android "a stolen product". Steve Jobs was also an arsehole and possibly a pederast who made sexually suggestive remarks to his daughter (according to her, he asked her if she'd learned to masturbate yet, daily, and when she finally said yes, he told her she'd be real popular with men). There was a lot wrong with the guy. He then released his phone on only a couple carriers, so Android was kind of a necessity if you lived in an area where one of those chosen carriers didn't cover (like I did — the iPhone wasn't even an option for me until the 5s) and then attacked the competition for doing what he didn't or couldn't.

Still, there has always been this animosity towards iPhone users. To me, they served two different markets. Android was kind of the wild west back then. I never had an Android phone I didn't run custom firmware on until I got my Galaxy S10 (which cannot be unlocked). It was all about new experiences and "what can we do with the platform?". It was awesome. Meanwhile, iPhone was always just this handheld Mac you could put in your pocket, and it could also make phone calls. For people who just want their phone to be like their computer, boring but with whatever wallpaper, it's fine. iPhone is predictable. It does innovate and it has and Android has copied plenty from it, but of course the inverse is also true.

But no, the Android users I talked to didn't think Google was screwing them at all. They thought they were rebels for not using the iPhone. Like the iPhone was a "Fisher-Price" or "baby's first" phone for people not smart enough to use Android. They always acted like Google had their back. Even the "privacy focused" custom firmware GrapheneOS requires you buy a Pixel. So you have to pay Google to get into their ecosystem, though they're now expanding to Motorola (which has never been great with smartphones, and no, not including the one you think, though IIRC the Atrix was the first smartphone with a fingerprint reader?). So yeah, all these guys who said having Android made them better than the iPhone users who are now saying Google is trying to make Android into iOS — yeah, I think leopards ate their face.