When it comes to trust, what reputation does Google have to protect? It's collecting data on anything & everything, hoovering private data wherever possible. W

When it comes to trust, what reputation does Google have to protect? It's collecting data on anything & everything, hoovering private data wherever possible. Working hard to ensure it's almost impossible to have an Android device not including their apps or services. And it's not like Google's Play Store hasn't had its share of malicious apps sneaking in. Similar for other hw/sw vendors just in different ways. I tend to place more trust in a community of volunteers working on open source software. Now, as for that community's ability to assemble reliable, well-tested OS images for a wide selection of devices, despite all the hurdles put up by those devices' hardware? Or check what 3rd party software goes into their repositories? There you have a point. All in all, it mostly comes down to not installing random apps from random 3rd parties. Regardless of the exact reasons to run 3rd party OSes like LineageOS (or one's thoughts about those), objections to OSes a device came with, are entirely valid: bloat, privacy, apps installed by default (sometimes non-removable), default settings, etc etc.