[lern_too_spel]

> How many people actually go trough the trouble of getting a third party contacts app?

100% of the users who don't want to give their contacts to Google. You're right that the Google contacts app provides a far superior experience to the iOS contacts app, so most users who don't care about providing their data will use that if it's the default.

> That still doesn't stop Google from processing the data that people enter.

But how will Google get the contact information? The fact remains that iOS requires the user to log into an Apple account. iOS requires users to tell Apple all the apps they run and ties that information to their Apple account. iOS requires that anybody who wants to get their location also send their location to Apple. Android does none of these.

> Yet on my friends Android phone all he had to do was enter my phone number and the same e-mail address I used to register a YouTube account, and Google matched and linked those two together to populate the contact with my YouTube profile picture.

This is called contact merging, which Google's contacts app does far better than iOS's. iOS is a far less usable platform with far more unavoidable privacy invasions.