That's the issue - apple devices run an opaque blob signed by the entity developing it which is also is in possession of the source code which it does not share

That's the issue - apple devices run an opaque blob signed by the entity developing it which is also is in possession of the source code which it does not share with anyone, so users can't inspect it to see what it actually does. For comparison in a Linux distro: - everything is built from source on distro infrastructure, users can inspect any an all source code of everything running on their machine - software updates are transparent and not enforced, user can read changelog or compare source code of the updates - software updates of individual packages don't usually go directly from upstream open source software developers but via a package maintainer in the distro, for each distro - if an upstream project introduced fishy stuff like Apple is doing would almost certainly be noticed by either one of the package maintainers or users due to changes in the source or in software behavior, alerting others to do source code analysis and stop the attempt from affecting users