Switching to an iPhone will put you in an even worse walled garden that respects you even less. Even simple things like setting your default navigation app in iOS are gated behind moving to the EU.

True, but the point is, once you've sucked it up and given up, you may as well get other benefits back in exchange for turning tail. And the iPhone is unfortunately THE primary platform most applications develop for.

Personally, I am willing to just ditch the Android, get an iPhone as a "contact- and banking-only" device, and drag with me some sort of small computer everywhere. I've already dragged a linux retroconsole to a large number of places and have watched videos and listened to music and even edited code through it. May as well do the obvious and call it quits on phones-for-non-phone purposes entirely if phones will be so dedicated to being shitboxes.