It's not a false equivalence at all. Both situations are taking away someone's control of something that they own, borne from a paternalistic desire to protect that person from themselves. If one is acceptable, the other should be. Conversely if one is unacceptable, the other should be unacceptable as well. Either paternalistic refusal to let people do as they wish is ok, or it isn't.

Maybe not, but I think that overextending any idea like that in the opposite direction of whatever point you are trying to make at least devolves into a "slippery slope" argument. For instance, is your point that all security on phones that impede freedom of the user (for instance, HTTPS, forced password on initial startup, not allowing apps to access certain parts of the phone without user permissions, verifying boot image signatures) should be removed as well?

The alcoholic knows the bad outcomes, and chooses to ignore them. The hapless Android user does not understand the negative consequences of sideloading. I think this makes for a substantial differerence between those two.

Protecting from scams isn't protection from the victim themselves. That should be obvious from the fact that very intelligent and technologically literate people too can fall for phishing attacks. Tell me for example, how many people in your life know how a bank would ACTUALLY contact you about a suspected hijacking and what the process should look like? And how about any of the dozens of other cover stories used? Not to mention the situations where the scammers can use literally the same method of first contact as the real thing (eg. spoofed). ...And the fact that for example email clients do their best to help them by obscuring the email address and only showing the display name, because that's obviously a good idea.