From my perspective it seems like Apple keeps releasing new privacy features and Android keeps being forced to catch up. What are the major privacy enhancements that Google has put out first?
In the beginning, Android showed you what an app could before you installed it, and it was an all-or-nothing approach – if you didn't want the app to do those things, your only choice was to not install it.
In the beginning, iOS didn't have this, and instead it prompted you for permission the first time an app wanted permission to do something. Additionally, app review had rules that apps had to operate correctly if you refused permission and that apps couldn’t ask for permissions irrelevant to what you are doing. So you can install an app, then pick and choose what you grant permission for.
Later, Android added the prompts to work the same as iOS. iOS hasn't changed to include the Android approach.
So in the very very very beginning it was:
iOS: prompts for permissions, but almost nothing (including accessing user data) requires permissions anyway
Android: Granular permissions for everything, but only asked at install time.
Since then iOS has become "more Android-y" in adding increasingly more granular permissions, and Android has become "more iOS-y" in those permission grants being on-demand and time-gated.
This took a few years to improve, but even today, there are Android apps that will refuse to work if you don't grant some (unnecessary, in the view of the user) permission. That kind of behavior is very, very rare among iOS apps.