You said soon but if you haven't purchased the device yet, a compromise between Googled Android device and iPhone is a deGoogled Android phone, without you having to install anything, e.g. https://murena.com/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-cmf-phone-1/ that I bought few months ago. It's now my daily driver since day 1, switched from iPhone (after nearly a decade) and since then didn't look back.

I did 0 tinkering for a deGoogle affordable phone. I put the SIM in, installed few alternatives and voila, great compromise IMHO.

"What about YouTube? Just use the web version?" Web versions are almost always more secure than the mobile app version of any app. The browser provides more security enforcement than app security.

It's not about going "full privacy-hardened" than to not use at all any phones with stock Apple and Google software. Seriously you can do any effort you want, the first one would be to install a custom android privacy based ROM. You can't go around it.

I would consider GrapheneOS instead of iOS. GrapheneOS provides full compatibility with Android without Google, and you can optionally install Google Play Services. Apple is as bad as Google in some aspects.

As for your main questions, these are my suggestions:

• Email: Proton Mail or Tuta Mail
• Search Engine: DuckDuckGo or Mullvad Leta for search engines, or SearXNG for a metasearch engine
• Browser: GrapheneOS's Vanadium browser
• YouTube: LibreTube for mobile or FreeTube for desktop
• Cloud Storage: There are many options, but a familiar option for you would be Proton Drive
• Photos: Aves Gallery or Gallery, with network permissions disabled

Most of these are Android-only, because iOS is still privacy invasive by nature. More software can be found on my list of software.

Cheers!

On Samsung phones, first bloat is Samsung software, Google is second priority.

• kDrive for cloud storage
• Tidal for music
• PeerTube/Odysee/Youtube (trying to get rid of the last one but it’s almost impossible) for videos
• Proton pass for password management
• Anytime player for podcasts

Apple is bad, but still probably better than Google when it comes to privacy.

For YouTube I use grayjay for without an account, it works fine for me, and I really like it.

For cloud storage I've tried dozens of services, red what I landed on was Filen. This is subjective ngl and last time I checked rclone was in beta?

For photos, I use ente; it's very solid. I see people use Immich too, but that's self-hosted.

Hope this helps you, good luck

Try newpipe for youtube. I am in love with it..

Proton Drive works great for me. They have a free tier, so you can try it out.

I only ever open YouTube links in the Brave browser, and I only use the brave browser for YouTube. No ads by default, even when signed in; speaks for itself. For all the people here who hate on Brave; only use it for YouTube. Its the best solution on Apple that I have found.

iCloud Drive is the best integrated, smoothest way to go for cloud storage. But you’re gonna pay, and Apple knows exactly how to price it so it always seems like the next tier is worth it, even though all of them are overpriced. I pay around $40 a month after taxes for Apple One because it’s the most cost effective option that gets me AppleTV+, Apple Music+, and 2TB of iCloud+. I don’t need 2TB of storage, I need 500GB; But that’s not a fuckin option. It goes from 200GB for $2.99 to 2TB for $9.99 with nothing in between. Apple TV+ on its own is $9.99 a month. Apple Music individual plan is $10.99 a month…but you can only stream on 1 device at a time, and they WILL give you constant annoying pop-ups and stop your music if you try to stream on more than one or if they mistakenly think you are streaming on more than one, which happened to me constantly, and fucking Senior Tier AppleCare support could NOT figure it out OR solve it. So I pay the extra 6 bucks a month for Apple One Family or whatever, which lets me stream on 6 devices simultaneously. I don’t ever DO that, but it magically stops that error that no one could solve. You also get Apple Arcade+, Apple News+, and Apple Fitness+, and I don’t use any of that shit.

The above also solves for your photo storage inquiry, which is also what I do.

Extensions I use for Safari are AdGuard, Wipr, Extract, Vinegar, Consent-o-Matic, Hush, and superagent. I use Kagi for search. Yes I pay for that.

Brace yourself. You’re going to get a lot of really mean and hateful comments in this community asking about Apple, so fair warning.