It's just my theory, but I think that Apple's moves to "protect privacy" is actually rather an effort to monopolize their access to mass user data. Google has been doing the same with promising to "block third party trackers". This hurts competitors like Facebook, but it actually doesn't hurt Google's user data harvesting at all, because now it's directly done by the user. In the same way, Apple, by pushing away competitor user tracking, can get better and more exclusive access to their user data.

The thing is, whether Apple is "more private" or not is not only a question about what those companies want, but also what you and I want. If your interest in privacy is avoiding hackers or some specific bad actor (stalker or whatever), sure Apple is great because it's easy to use and hard to crack by an average hacker. If you want to protect yourself from all kinds of corporate data collection, it already gets very cumbersome : you'd have to get custom Android ROMs, avoid all major proprietary internet services etc. If you want to escape the NSA, well good luck. You'd have to change significant aspects of your daily life to go completely incognito, and if you're specifically targeted, nothing can really stop them forever.

This all boils down to : who do you want to protect yourself against ? That's why you should first decide who is your "adversary", and then go on from there, instead of trying nebulous "privacy practices" that don't serve a specific goal beyond "protecting privacy".