A ~dozen programmers are shipping a demonstrably more secure version of a multi-billion-dollar corporation's own operating system on that company's own hardware. That's incredible.

Or, it was lower priority for discovering exploits due to the number of users.

It's a possibility. Graphene has some traction though and if a potential high-importance target is running the OS, Cellebrite wouldn't want to be doing emergency vulnerability research to respond.

Perhaps there is an argument to be made that this is a reason "computer security" should not be delegated to a third party, such as an advertising services company like the ones in Silicon Valley, Redmond or Seattle

The reasoning is that the company, being concerned with online advertising and reach,^1 has the incentive to ensure that the software becomes popular with the largest possible number of users, perhaps even achieving monopoly power. According to traditional HN commentary, this makes the company and its software a preferred target for exploits by virtue of its popularity

1. Online surveillance practices to potentially support targeted advertising services, where the companies wantonly collect enormous quantities of data about millions of people, also makes them a target for exploits, e.g., "data breaches"

Consider an alternative status quo where computer owners, i.e., software users, have many options to choose from, including many operating systems, browsers, "app stores", "platforms", and so on

None of the options may be necessarily better choices for "security" for technical reasons^2 but the fact that those who target software from a small number of advertising services juggernauts with millions of users ("lucrative targets") are denied access to such lucrative targets, because the lucrative targets do not exist, is an improvement to "security" overall

2. But some may compete and attempt to distinguish themselves on this basis

In this alternative status quo there would likely be requirements that software be compliant with open standards and interoperable, allowing computer users to write, edit, compile, install and choose whatever software they desire, from any source, including their own brain, i.e., they might choose to write, compile and install their own software on their own computers