I don't think we ended up in a place much better off from a freedom perspective.
Android is a little better because parts of it are open. Google has been steadily moving things into play services though, which is not open. There is now an open source replacement for play services - I don't think it's very compatible yet though.
This is a good thing, they've been de-googling the base OS and making it as stripped down and bare-bones as possible.
This is a huge win for security, privacy, and freedom in general, and exactly what they should be doing. Android should be a small, secure Linux based operating system with an API that makes it easy to build services on top of it. The Google ecosystem should be completely decoupled from the OS.
It's also an effective way of building the walls around the garden.
It's such an easy way to run the mobile race compared to start ing from scratch.