To quote Daniel:

> iOS definitely does still offer better privacy from apps and their services are generally more privacy respecting than Play Services. However, a lot of the invasiveness of Play Services is really opt-in or opt-out just like comparable analytics, etc. on iOS. It has privacy issues, but a lot of the claims about it are misinformation and it's possible to set up a Google account and stock device to be fairly privacy respecting. I prefer devices without Play Services, but there are comparable issues in Windows, macOS, iOS and even Linux distributions, etc. Play and Google apps are particularly bad offenders in terms of nagging you to enable privacy invasive features, and having some bad defaults. Usually they get you to opt-in to the truly privacy invasive bits, but the nagging means most people end up doing it, since otherwise you'd need to actually disable some of the notifications which most people probably don't even know how to do.