@danie10 I've had a similar path with phones. I've been an Android user for about as long as those phones have been around. Every now and then I've played around with iPhones wihtout actually owning one so that I know what's on the other side of the fence.

Every time I did that, I came to the same conclusion: This product is limiting my actions at every turn. It's imposing all sorts of artificial limitations and I just can't tolerate any of it. At the same time Android gives me the freedom to do just about anything I want, so the choice was very clear.

That lasted a few more years until one day you couldn't use the external SD card for installing apps. I just switched to LineageOS at that point and continued along that path for a few more years. Another reason for doing that was the fact that phone manufacturers usually abandon all phones that are older than 12 months. That sort of business is just not ethical since it enocurages people to buy a new phone every year and it punishes the people who use the same phone for more than a year. #LineageOS doesn't do that. As long as someone is supporting your phone model, you can expect to receive updates long after the OEM has already forgotten that model ever even existed. That's why I was still able to use my Galaxy S5 in 2019.

However, eventually I got tired of Google knowing too much about me and the way I use my phone, so I decided to get rid of Gapps on my phone, and installed just Lineage with no ties to Google. That #degoogle experiment revealed that there are in fact some vital apps that really don't want to work properly in plain Vanilla Android with no Gapps or any sort of Google stuff in it. Also, Updating stuff through F-droid is incredibly inconvenient, so a degoogled LineageOS just wans't daily driver material for me.

At that point I had to make a decision: Do I want to switch to mainstream Android and buy a new phone as soon as the OEM decides to abandon my model, or should I get the phone I've hated for years. Honestly, I hate both options, but I have to say I hate the iPhone less, so got one of those. The privacy level you get with an iPhone isn't quite what I wanted, but at least it's better than allowing Google to track every step you take.

I got a used iPhone 7 and I was pleasantly surprised. Apple had finally fixed vast majority of the annoying restrictions they had in the previous models. Sure, ringtones are still a nightmare, and there's no real file management, but so many restrictions are gone that iOS is actually becoming a barely acceptable operating system. Previously iOS was completely unusable, but now it's merely annoying.