Walled Garden is marketing speak. Walled Prison is the reality.
Its always been like this, but I don't think their target demographic cares. I remember 10 years ago I heard something like: "Iphone, the phone your mom uses." Not that its accurate. Blows my mind VIPs use iphones after Pegasus.. How could these people be so unaware?
iPhones, particularly with the advanced security/hardening turned on are light years in front of Android devices for protection against advanced/sophisticated actors. Which is why VIPs use iPhones.
Apple responded to Pegasus with Lockdown Mode, which is probably the most hardcore security modality that's ever shipped in mass produced consumer hardware.
Apparently Cellebrite is able to crack open iPhones but not phones running GrapheneOS. There's no doubt iPhones are reasonably secure but I wouldn't say they have "the most hardcore security".
This cuts both ways - ADP requires changing some settings on-device, and (in some cases I've heard) calling Apple to disable. So it is baked in, but it's hardly easy to enable and disable
GrapheneOS (which, FWIW, I do trust at least as much as ADP) has a web-installer IIRC, making it similarly easy to enable, but a little harder to disable for normal users. Moreover, it's not built-in to the Pixel. It's entirely third-party, and did not ship on mass-market hardware
Being an option on the default OS, with OEM support, can make all the difference sometimes
People have been getting zero-click hacked on iPhones by Israeli malware now also in use by ICE, even recently. I don't blame Apple too much given what they're up against, but zero-clicks are the worst thing possible.
Empirical evidence doesn't support this. IIRC the bounty for an Android exploit is 500k more than an iphone... Let alone the number of people killed from an Android exploit is... 0? Iphone is at least at 1... Let alone the 1000 other VIPs.
Induction says, its dangerous to have an iphone. There is no deduction based answer here that has been validated by experiment.
Its always been like this, but I don't think their target demographic cares. I remember 10 years ago I heard something like: "Iphone, the phone your mom uses." Not that its accurate. Blows my mind VIPs use iphones after Pegasus.. How could these people be so unaware?