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Google photos on ios is literally a hostage situation. Remove key functionalities like copying an image or editing an image unless you give them full unrestricted access to your entire photo library. (The holy grail of surveillance capitalism data). Data extortion masquerading as a service.
Android is not good either. Google Calendar requires access to all my contacts to run. Nope.
Android isn't really that hard to like 90% de-google, you can replace most google apps with FOSS alternatives, then disable and deny all permissions to almost all google apps, even uninstall many... you can do that all without root, without even ADB.
To get to 100%, yeah, you're gonna need ADB and root and some kind of replacement OS... but you can do a lot without it.
I might be on an old enough version that it still functions as intended without that permission (its from 2021 lol). Photos on the other hand nags you to update and eventually completely stops you from using it unless you "update". Thankfully I can disable both apps so it's not a big deal for me