If you are focusing just on security, I would agree. On the question of privacy, Apple is certainly better than Google, because Google’s business model is based on monetizing people’s personal data for targeted advertising. However it is worth pointing out that Apple was willing to give the NSA access to their servers before the Snowden revelations. It was only after the Snowden exposed Apple, that Apple started its campaign to market the iPhone as respecting your privacy. Likewise, it was only after Apple got caught lying to its customers about how it was using their audio recordings to train Siri, that the company stopped its bad practices. A 2018 study found that the iPhone is far better than an Android phone, but it still transmits a lot of data to Google servers.
As Apple moves toward selling web services, I think it likely that Apple will collect its customers’ personal data to do targeted marketing of Apple’s web services.
If we look at other areas such as user rights, software freedom, planned obsolescence in hardware design and abuse of the intellectual property system, I judge Apple to be worse than Google. Apple has been the industry leader in trying to prevent people from fixing their own devices. I judge Apple and Huawei/HiSilicon to be the two worst mobile chip makers, because not only do they not share any information about their chips which makes it impossible to implement free drivers for them, but they also lock the bootloaders so it is impossible for the user to change the bootloader and/or operating system.
I give Apple credit for a few things, like providing 5 years of software updates for iPhones and not basing its profits on monetization of users’ personal data, but overall, but I see it as promoting a different kind of kind of exploitative relationship with its users, based on locking them into its expensive ecosystem, which may be better than what Google does, but it’s hardly laudable.