Just grab a regular Bluetooth earphones then. Those $20 ones may seem to be too good to be true, but they work and sound great, and you can replace them on a whim if they do die.
You can have a walled garden but not charge 30% for it. You can have all the protections in place but not charge 30% for it. Also scam apps can and will use Apple's IAP to scam your grandparents still.
This report lack a lot of technical information. What counts as "personal information"? What did they send exactly? Is sending app analytics count as personal information? Why don't you hold American software companies to the same level of rigor?
Case in point, almost all apps on my Android phone snoops on my "personal information"; Google literally knows where I am all the time; Facebook SDK snoops on the apps I use, and justify the collection of the data with "better personalization of services"; WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) vacuuming contacts off my phone; LinkedIn snoops on my clipboard etc.
I never got ads in any of the Samsung apps, I keep hearing this but never saw it in my lifetime using Samsung phones.
Also don't know what are people's problem with Touchwiz. It's a launcher, why are people so anal about a launcher? It does what it's supposed to do and stays out of the way.
I chose Samsung because of the value it brings in software, particularly Knox and support for app containers. Their hardware ecosystem is also quite fleshed out, although I haven't buy into it yet.
No other phone manufacturer comes close in terms of value.