The way that the stock apps in AOSP are barebones and have been practically abandoned in favor of nicer closed Google-branded counterparts is also suggestive of them trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Do we know for a fact Apple made fewer deals like these? I don't think we do.

Apple makes a lot of deals. A lot. I'd expect them to be about even.

Details on some of these came through in the Epic v Apple case, but they were very light https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/5/22421734/apple-epic-netfli...

Google just has more types of companies in the ecosystem to make deals with. Apple’s iOS OEM deals can’t be found anticompetitive because they don’t have those deals to begin with.

It’s interesting that none of the desperate arrangements were lower fees; the closest being ability to upsell preexisting subscribers (off apples platform)

Apple was pretty careful not to make deals. For instance Microsoft and Epic both publicly complained about not getting deals.

Supposedly, the 15%-after-first-year rule for subscriptions that they instituted was because they were trying to entice Netflix to continue to take in-app payment for subscriptions. Rather than a sweetheart deal, they rolled it out as a platform change.

There are areas which I think are more questionable, such as their Apple TV partnerships with Amazon and a few others.

Netflix reportedly had special terms for years before that policy change for everyone else. I don’t think they were the only ones.

I think Apple just did that because it was becoming clear that what they were saying wasn’t true/they were getting political pressure about charging 30% no matter what.

I don’t remember the exact timing on the change so my guess as to the cause may be wrong.

There was a whole trial about this. If Apple had these deals, it would have come out. Google and Apple ran things differently.

or perhaps Apple just had a stronger policy to not create documentation around these

I mean a lot of it just doesn’t apply. Google was caught paying off Samsung to encourage them not to put alternate app stores on their devices. Squashing competition where it should exist.

Apple makes the devices, so they aren’t making others squash competition. They’re exactly what they say.

Apple made deals to set the default search engine and the default maps app, and rejected other app stores. As bad as Google is, Apple is even worse, setting worse terms for deals and rejecting other deals outright to favor their own products.

Your second sentence is not even remotely supported by the first.

We know that Epic asked and were refused prior to the lawsuit.

Beyond that there’s no evidence one way or another that there are any sweetheart deals. None of the public documents from the trials showed that.

Anything beyond that is speculation.

Apple didn't need to make as many deals as they're the only OEM. There's no real way to have a separate app store on Apple phones.

Smartphone makers need app store revenue to make the handsets competitively priced. It would really hurt Android market share if all non-Google Android phones were say 10-20% more expensive to compensate for that. Or alternatively if you had a fragmented ecosystem with a separate app store per OEM.

I'm not saying that it's a good thing, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to share app store revenue with the OEM making the device.

Can't speak to the deals with particular app developers like Riot or Spotify

That does not refute the point. Google gives you a choice of A or B and then incentives you to choose A. And then Apple gives you one choice which is A. Now tell me which is worse.

Google didn’t incentivize you to choose A. They incentivized Samsung not to give you choice B at all so you’d have to install it yourself.

> significantly less

But even one deal is enough.