That business model broke once Velos Media and Access Advance realized they could game the system by offering a handful of net-implementer companies severely reduced patent rates if they agreed to license their patents or, better yet, pull out of MPEG-LA entirely. The end result is that companies have to license significant portions of H.265 multiple times from three different patent pools... and most people who are even remotely cost-sensitive just aren't bothering with it at all and are sticking with H.264 or moving to AV1.
Apple has yet to implement AV1 in hardware, which makes using the codec exclusively a non-starter as they have a very dim opinion of software decoders. I imagine they joined AOM to either hedge some bets or extract leverage from H.265/H.266 patent owners. The thing is that their business absolutely does not require the existence of a viable royalty-free codec, unlike Google's, which does. We'll know if Apple's actually decided to join the Free video party if they actually ship an AV1 decoder in their silicon.
[0] Leonardo is very vocally opposed to AOM's lack-of-a-business-model, see:
https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu...
https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-future-without-mpeg/
https://blog.chiariglione.org/revisiting-the-patents-in-stan...
If you're wondering, he's the former chair of MPEG, before ISO decided to cut up MPEG into a bunch of different pieces and more or less left him without a job. He's salty about that too: https://blog.chiariglione.org/iso/