Most big global brands are getting into rent seeking because the technology allows it, even company's like GE aka General Electric have diversified from making light bulbs to making money from finance activities so there is bound to be a reason for this avoidance to have an industry wide sdk. They may also want to avoid being labelled a cartel like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel because legislation isnt brilliant either, just look at dieselgate, all the major motor manufacturers were engaged in the activities but because of US and UK national debts and deficits, Obama went after Merkel and Germany to get them to spend some money and they didnt so dieselgate appeared! Things are never what they claim to be in the news either.

However the flip side is, many global brands sponsor directly or indirectly university's around the world, and research is not cheap, if you saw the recent iphone lens exploded diagram a bit like this one https://wccftech.com/apple-working-new-iphone-camera/ you would see there is a lot of work going into all sorts of devices and the low hanging fruit from optics was harvested decades ago.