Ultimately I believe apple is responsible for this feature not being included, but the rumour of it being Apple's request is probably not the full picture (or even accurate). Apple is known to approach companies that are likely to infringe on what Apple believes to be their IP, a recent example that came to light was a meeting between Steve Jobs and Samsung executives.

It's clear Google will not (and never were) going to heed any directions given by Apple. Apple probably did approach google about it, but I suspect it's likely that Google held back on the feature due to potential legal ramifications of including the feature. (Remembering here that Google originally entered the market as a phone provider.)

> It's clear Google will not (and never were) going to heed any directions given by Apple

Actually the history is more complicated. Google held off on including multitouch but when Apple banned Google Voice from the App Store things soured. I think it was at that point Google said "Ok, if you're banning our stuff then the deal's off" and put multitouch in Android. So it's not clear how long Google might have held back multitouch if Apple had played nice (I'm sure the answer isn't "forever", but they might have gone much longer).

I'd say they're not too closely related, as the two were already bitter with each other before that point. Google Voice was rejected from the iOS app store: July 2009 Multi-touch on android SDK commenced around: November 2009, sure they could have been developing it earlier, however in the following January google launched the nexus one with multitouch, which would have needed more than the short development time from July 09.

I.E. they're both as guilty as each other.

> sure they could have been developing it earlier,

Actually there is evidence they had developed it much earlier. Some people examining the source tree found it was basically present in the G1 but commented out. They were even able to enable it with some crazy hacks - more info:

http://openhandsetmagazine.com/2009/01/the-story-of-multitou...

> the following January google launched the nexus one with multitouch

No I'm pretty sure the Nexus launched without multitouch; it was enabled in a release (2.1 update 1, a couple of months after launch). Again, an indication that even as late as January 2010 Google was still holding back - whether it was out of fear or through some hope of reconciliation - no idea. But I suspect the latter. Android was still small enough at that point that getting barred from the iPhone wholesale would have been horrible.

I think we're more or less agreeing here. I guess my only point is that to talk about any one incident in the chain in isolation is highly misleading.