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Some 5 years ago, I switched to Firefox Mobile out of annoyance because Chrome refused to block all those popups random websites would show, some prompting an app install, and never looked back.
Google has since made a lot of improvements including tightening up which apps can install other apps (not a blanket permission anymore), running the Potentially Harmful Applications program, narrowing down fingerprinting (still some way to go as evident by TFA). Google is even thinking about the code that runs outside of Android and locking those up in crosvms [0]. I'm positive, things will improve [1] even if slowly because Android, at this point, is the most widely distributed OS and they can't move as fast anymore without hurting developers and users.
That said, Google did implement what they call AppOps which paved for tremendous amount of user control including blocking apps from starting activities (UI) / services (background) or from throwing intents (basic cross-app API building block on Android).
Fortunately, if your device is rooted, you can use AppOps [2]; but then rooting exposes you to an incredible amount of security issues on its own.
Besides, there are little-snitch esque Firewalls for both root and non-root devices [3].
[0] https://youtu.be/edqJSzsDRxk
[1] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/search/label/Secur...
[2] https://github.com/MuntashirAkon/AppManager
[3] https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/android/firewall
> No - There is no 'easy' way to store/restore the entire phone as I believe Apple does.
I think Android phones with the Google Services Framework installed do provide such a way. Alternatively, if you're using a custom ROM (like GrapheneOS on Pixel devices), you can use Seedvault[0] for full backups of your phone. It basically acts as a drop-in replacement of the backup service provided by Google.
[0]: https://github.com/seedvault-app/seedvault