China's border police are installing surveillance apps on the smartphones of some tourists

[Markoni35]

From that same site:
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1224/product_id-19997/Google-Android.html

Apple runs a very tight ship with their App Store, so you're definitely much safer filling your phone with random apps if you're an iOS user. Google's store is much more lenient, letting many not so safe apps slip by. So while you have more choice with apps capable of doing more things (like apps that require root access), if you're careless installing apps by unknown developers, you could definitely install some sketchy apps. Of course it's the same with Windows if you start downloading and installing just any software. I've never infected my computer, and I've never infected my phone.

Just to be clear, I'm using Android. I don't like iOS user interface, nor the iPhone's high price. But when it comes to security, not only iOS is much safer, but it was built to protect the user. It will for example offer to fake the microphone, or camera, if the app refuses installation without access to those. On Android that's not the case. iOS will rather cheat the app than its users.

Android was from the very start a spying app, just like all other Google apps (which is why they are all free). They don't care about user privacy being violated by 3rd party software simply because Google itself is the biggest spying operation on the planet.

On the other hand, it's easier to use Android than iOS and it's more open to communication with Windows, Linux and other systems than iOS. But when it comes to security, it sucks. Google is known to delay fixes for months even when the security hole is worldwide known and abused by hackers. Even when bugs are fixed by independent programmers, Google often deliberately delays fixing the problem. So... Android being open source doesn't mean that problem will be fixed sooner.