Based on your stated assumptions about backdoors, how about building your own RISC-V phone?

https://mikrophone.net/

It’s not in a very usable state, but the hardware is open source.

Sounds like you trust iOS sandboxing. I have my suspicions it’s not perfect, so how big of a deal it is depends on your threat model. If I’m on iOS I tend to manually enable the camera if I ever need it, and I also avoid using apps when possible.

If I needed to use an app daily that requires camera access, I might change my habit because that sounds like a lot of work.

Was looking for this comment. Racism was extremely pervasive in certain areas.

The biggest reason Uber and Lyft took off is cabs sucked for the most part. Uber and Lyft aren’t great either, but people forget how bad Taxis were at that time.