They got punished for paying companies off to not compete on their open platform

But they are the ones that allowed those companies to compete in the first place. And I'm not saying that they should have won. Both Apple and Google losing would have been the best outcome. However, Google losing and Apple winning is the worst. Because its makes open platforms even less attractive to businesses.

Unfortunately, apple’s position as both phone manufacturer, iOS manufacturer, and App Store maintainer resulted in them being able to successfully argue that their control over the App Store was a feature that was expected by users and was needed to maintain a smooth and secure operating ecosystem

Google, on the other hand, just got pilloried because they are not the phone manufacturer (for the most post), but instead were using their position as the producers of android to pressure phone manufacturers and companies to not compete. Their own internal docs showed the extreme lengths they were willing to go to stop companies from producing third party apps stores. It was this stifling of completion that just got them reamed by the court

if you zoom out you find that Google got published for allowing other manufacturers into their Android system while Apple benefited from keeping ios closed to themselves. how does this serve the consumers ultimately

Google got punished for paying off companies to not compete with the Google Play Store.

You are in this hyper dense loop of just repeating the same thing, which is adding 0 here.

It's quite literally impossible for apple to be do the same, because they've banned installing apps at all on their platform. Clearly the right move for Google would have been to do the same 15 years ago and saved themselves the headache.

Yes because we see how well that Google has been at selling hardware

Well seeing that consumers in the US prefer iOS to Android and pay more than twice as much for the privilege, may they care about different things than side loading?

No, they’re getting punished because they faced a jury instead of a judge.

It sounds like Google chose a jury, which means someone badly miscalculated how popular they were with people in SF:

https://www.wired.com/story/jury-will-decide-if-googles-play...

Google was punished for making deals to limit competition on their ‘open’ platform.

Apple doesn’t really make these deals, so they weren’t punished for that.

So Google should have never allowed competition to begin with like Apple. That doesn't seem like a great answer to me.

They did not allow competition, they made illegal deals to keep their App Store installed on other devices.

If they left it alone and all OEMs chose to keep Google play store and billing, nothing would’ve happened.

No, Google shouldn’t have given Riot Games $10m in marketing to prevent launching a competing android store, or give OEMs 20% cut of Play revenue to prevent them from bundling competing stores. Or cut a special deal with Spotify where it pays 0% while still using Play Store billing.

You mean just like Epic got special marketing deals from console manufacturers?

Right - a co-marketing deal isn’t the illegal thing. It’s the "limiting competition" part that gets them in trouble. This case was entirely about figuring out when a ‘good business deal’ becomes anti-competitive. This is also playing out now with Google paying Apple for default search engine.

If it was revealed that Sony gave Epic a special marketing deal to prevent Epic from launching a console, then yeah that would be pretty dodgy!

Epic shouldn't get special pricing either. Even Epic will say that.