If you can escape the "garden" just by checking a box, it's not much of a walled garden. The choice is very real, e.g. there's nothing like F-Droid on iOS devic

If you can escape the "garden" just by checking a box, it's not much of a walled garden. The choice is very real, e.g. there's nothing like F-Droid on iOS devices. This makes Android devices a fairly sensible choice overall, although some devices are still more open than others (supporting e.g. alternative, Google-free OS's like LineageOS, and perhaps the future PostmarketOS).