There where ways to have all of this long before either normal Android or iOS had it.
By rooting your phone you could setup combinations of special firewall, and GPS spoofing rules. Which is more privacy preserving then forbidding GPS in some situations.
All with Apps setting things up for you with reasonable UX.
This is a good example why closed eco systems (Apple) or semi-closed eco systems (Google,1) are a problem.
(1): Many essential Apps stop working on de-googled or even "just" rooted Android phones, so it's still semi-closed wrt. this aspects.
> There where ways to have all of this long before either normal Android or iOS had it.
Do you mean something like PDroid or XPrivacy? Yeah that was indeed pretty awesome, however these already used underlying APIs that were the precursor to permission management. If I recall correctly the first inofficial permission manager was in AOSP Android 4.3 (Jelly Bean). It was however not that useful compared to the alternatives and also hard to access if at all.
As a sidenote: PDroid is still my gold standard. It was annoying to install, but it worked really well.
By rooting your phone you could setup combinations of special firewall, and GPS spoofing rules. Which is more privacy preserving then forbidding GPS in some situations.
All with Apps setting things up for you with reasonable UX.
This is a good example why closed eco systems (Apple) or semi-closed eco systems (Google,1) are a problem.
(1): Many essential Apps stop working on de-googled or even "just" rooted Android phones, so it's still semi-closed wrt. this aspects.