Apple sells the illusion of security and privacy, but they're not meaningfully more secure or private except from the device's owner. Remember when they made a big deal of blocking Facebook tracking, while simultaneously adding their own intrusive tracking?
That's not the full story. Using LUKS encryption on your linux laptop might make it "safe BFU", but only if you're using a high entropy password. Most people don't want to enter a 24 character password to unlock their phone, so Apple/Google have to add dedicated security hardware to resist bruteforce attempts, hence the vulnerabilities.
So we agree: it's puzzling that Google can't manage to do it.
>Lots more devices are safe BFU than just Apple's
Really? Secure against the exploits and methods these tools 3 letter agencies employ? I hate to cry source, but base Android isn't secure. What devices have similar hardware-level security, or have their Android flavor shipping with these Graphene-OS-level patches?
Before First Unlock data on your device is as safe as your password safe. It doesn't really matter if you use Android, iOS or any other devices as long as it have modern crypto on it.