The reality is that security/privacy will always be a balancing act with convenience.

If you increase your security and privacy, you will lose convenience.

If you increase your convenience, you will lose security and privacy.

It's always a tradeoff.

It's up to you what things you're willing to trade off, in the end. Everyone can give valuable input, but it will always be up to you to make the final decision on what level of tradeoff you're willing to accept and what level fits your threat model.

For total security and privacy you would basically have to not use electronics at all and live in a cabin in the woods and have a good grasp of chemistry, scavenging and farming to take care of yourself. I think a guy named Ted did that once and it didn't work out so great for him, but of course, he also didn't actually just keep to himself in those woods.

And to be fair, these days even that's not a guarantee of total privacy with satellite imagery, drones, etc.

iphones are not more private than androids.

don't believe apple marketing at face value.

My recommendation is to keep both separate. Your work phone should NEVER be your personal phone.

Use you work phone at work or on a mission. Not outside, not at home, it does not matter what your contract says, what the law says is what's important (so check locally, depends on jurisdictions).

Now IMHO both options such. Apple is closed source and Android provided by work is not customizable so you have no control over. If you want a more radically approach and are serious about privacy, reconsider both.

Get a phone case with a credit card slot in the back and replace your cloud storage with Syncthing.

You can lead a horse to water...

I don’t want an even higher level spyware device.

but I use [...] AirTags regularly

Hmm...

Alfred is disappointed.

It might be time to move on from the mass-surveillance-on-every-single-device style of object location tracking.
Are there localising/tracking bluetooth tags available which only connect to your network/devices?

I don't see a question in there. What are you asking?

For what it's worth, I run GrapheneOS and can use my phone to pay for stuff via NFC just like any other phone user. I've used it in various countries and it Just Works™.

To achieve this you just need to find a payment app that works.

In my country, I use Curve.

All of those things are very easy to replace.

I'm confused what you're asking. You have 2 phones, why not continue using Apple Pay/FindMy on your main device?

I also would need to find good alternatives to iCloud, and photos

Proton.

Worth noting that Google is in the process of killing sideloading so you may as well just stick with Apple at this point. Or get a flip phone.

I'd argue being between proprietary platforms is keeping your options open, not being in purgatory. I wouldn't try to synergize privacy with online payments at a tap IRL beyond Apple. Until there's a like, seamless tap crypto-pay (which will never happen, Visa would NEVER allow its monopoly to break, they pay Apple Google search monopoly money to still go through them) your best bet to be least spied on while paying with a phone is Apple.

I use gOS and my solution for Pay is a Visa in my phone case... As to AirTags there are solutions for finding things locally but nothing with the reach of AirTags if you left something somewhere else due to apple installing it on all their phones. I find analogue solutions will do personally. Find my phone still works. iCloud and photos I replaced with a homeserver with Immich, also pihole there to sort ads, but you can get most of the way there with proton if that's intimidating.

Samsung galaxy smart tags are a thing and Find too, I'm using it on a daily basis.

I use Syncthing as an alternative to iCloud to sync files between devices. But there is also NextCloud and even commercial offerings like DropBox.

For Photos I use Immich and it's amazing.

And at least here in Korea Samsung Pay works everywhere while my wife with Apple Pay has to carry coach or a credit card with her everywhere she goes.

I’m in the same boat, sort of. iPhone 16 Pro Max main, Galaxy S10 backup (WiFi only, cosplay prop). New iPhones are just not exciting so I’m thinking I’ll update the Android phone next. I need Apple for Apple Health and I don’t think iPads do Apple Health? So I might keep the iPhone to do Health and to pair with my watch and main Android for a while? It’s not definite but it is a consideration. Their keyboard is way better. Almost zero privacy on official firmware though. I wonder if Samsung is better than Pixel in that regard or if it just adds a head to the hydra. Like, I really like the S24 and S25 — wife has S22 and even that is pretty good. Anyway, this is not a this year or next year problem, this is like 2028-2029 when my iPhone gets to be 4-5 years old.