Regardless if the average Android is way worse for privacy than an iPhone, on Android you have the freedom to install whatever you want and delete whatever you want. That is invaluably important.
Even if GrapheneOS ceased to exist, I still couldn't go back to iPhone because of the loss of freedom as well as the huge, wonderful community of open source Android apps.
Any government that does this is authoritarian and enemies of democracy
Related:
Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111531
Canada’s Bill C-22 would weaken protections on private messages
Private foreign tech companies need to be come under the jurisdiction of the governments that they operate in. We'd all love to be in a world of open source, open web, open AI but that has become a naive vision which is very far from what we have today. Canada is right, but so too is Signal. What Canada needs it is own sovereign tech stack - it can only start with de facto national firewalls ike this