With products where you pay for them in advance, you are the customer. So the companies making money off you tend to try and please you. In apple's case, sometimes they make decisions for the good of the user base, and those can annoy users with specific needs, but at the end of the day spying on their users is counter productive to being a profitable business.

With ad/search sponsored products ie. google and now canonical, the business has 2 customers. The consumer and the people they are selling ads to. And they aren't even making money off you directly, so it doesn't take much logic to work out where the balance of interests lie.