I expect tech nerds to be aware that the conflict of interests exists in this case, while the average person would not.
There's no right answer, everything is a shade of gray. Your strongest ethics aren't necessarily your neighbors'.
This, I suspect is a large part of it. At least for me, as a self described "tech nerd" who have been messing with computers since my childhood in the 90s.
The other aspect is that I don't do anything serious from my phone. I'm still "old school" I guess and prefer a keyboard + mouse. My laptop is my main computing device, not my phone. And for that, Apple currently offers the best of a bad situation. It's still advantageous to them from a marketing standpoint to offer privacy, and they aren't primarily an advertising company. They are the only one of the two that offer E2EE (Advanced Data Protection) for photos, all the processing for that is done on device, etc. When meta threw their huge fit over the app tracking transparency, but were silent on anything Google was doing with Android, that just sold Apple even more for me.
I'v made a choice to accept the tradeoff of them being an application gate keeper because for anything "serious" I'd just be using my computer anyway, which still allows me to install and run whatever I want, and do whatever I want with the hardware. I don't need that from a phone. Quite the opposite, I don't want that on a phone, I'm totally fine with the phone just being an appliance, and Apple offers the best appliance experience still.
Yes, here, you can talk about the relative merits of one piece of tech vs. another and compared with your personal needs. Of course, what is immoral is never permissible—it is nonsensical to speak of immorality otherwise—but there's nothing of the sort here. The behavior of the OP is a kind of moralizing rigorism, that is, the imposition of a personal concern on others that has no objective severity of the sort being claimed, as if his personal concerns here are morally binding on others.
> Ethics are personal, subjective, and subject to trade-offs.
Subjective, no. Morality (ethics is the study of morality) is objective, or it is nothing. Murder is evil not because I arbitrarily opine—with no objective basis whatever—that it is evil, but because it actually is evil, and to choose to commit it is a gravely immoral act.
Morality may be objective [1], but Ethics is not just/no longer only the "study" of morality but the subjective practice and personal application of it. Ethics becomes the pragmatic and imperfect framework for working with the belief system of the other's ideals. If you want an infosec analogy, think "security threat model" versus "security posture". Morality is your ideal "security threat model", many people will have shared threat models and a lot of lofty goals and ideas to guard against them in theory. Ethics is your "security posture", what you are actively doing day to day to guard against threats, not just imagined, but the real ones you encounter on those days. People may share the same "security threat model" but nearly every "security posture" is a unique and personal snowflake with differing imperfections (and sometimes unique beauty).
[1] You paraphrased Immanuel Kant, which suggests to me you may have a strong religious background/upbringing coloring at least some of your view here. Unfortunately, this overall question of if there is an objective Morality is a centuries long debate among Philosophers and people have different perspectives across different religions and in different cultures. Immanuel Kant was a strong voice on the side of an absolute and objective Morality, but there are so many other viewpoints. Defining a truly objective Morality is harder than it sounds, even if there are lots of individual moral beliefs many religions and cultures share together. Especially, I believe, as imperfect people working through however many layers of imperfections we may have accumulated in our personal ethical frameworks along the way to having these philosophical discussions. Because Philosophers can't agree on if Morality is objective and/or absolute or neither, it becomes useful to separate the discussion of the ideal state (Morality) and the subjective practices (Ethics) as separate things.
