fred's dead  🦌 ✨

I don't debate the first point, but Android is a viable alternative, saying otherwise is just being ignorant.

Android is no more free software than iOS.

That's not really true. While it could definitely be more free, you can actually get the source code and contribute to Android. There are closed source components, but iOS is vastly more closed.

but the same technically applies to iOS because its underlying OS is Darwin, which is FOSS.

No, Darwin is like Linux, the kernel. You cannot say a kernel is an operating system. In android, the operating system itself (AOSP) is FOSS, and the equivalent in iOS is not FOSS.

Darwin isn't the kernel though. It's the XNU kernel plus some cribbed BSD code, a network stack, an Apple's API I/O drivers. It's more of a software distribution. and you *can* say the kernel is the OS because they're both generally defined the exact same way.

if we're going by the nomenclature for a program that manages memory, schedules tasks, and runs other programs, the "operating system" and the "kernel" both fit this.

Ok whatever, I don't agree with you but it's ok, it's my opinion vs yours. The point is that Android is a lot more open source than iOS, and you cannot dispute that.