If that's the narrative, then they didn't do it because they wanted to help Apple, they did it to help themselves (and helping Apple is simply a byproduct of that). Either way, it's a big stretch to blame Apple for Google helping themselves.

Their ad revenue must be several orders of magnitude higher than their phone sales revenue, though.

But not higher than their repair ad revenue, nor their value in their buisnes relations to apple.

But I suspect in this case it is more likely a "don't care" attitude from google to that small market.

Controlling what people do with their devices protects their revenue stream.

Like on the ads they'll see on their devices.

Hey, what big change did Google make to Chrome with regard to Adblockers recently for Enterprise users?

Yeah, I think they've practically been losing money on phones since they started. I mean they're not losing YouTube levels of money, but it's not very profitable. And anyway compared to any search ads everything else is peanuts.

You can still spend money/resources/take action to protect one's loss leader's position in the market.

Apple is attempting to do whatever it takes to monopolize the after-market.

Google is not. Search "pixel3 repair" or "iphoneX repair" on google and in both cases, you might get a couple of official apple or google hits at the top as you'd expect, and then scores of hits for iFixit and independent repair shops including maps.

I absolutely believe GP got nailed by adwords, but it doesn't seem like the search itself is being warped to pretend like there's no options.

Google sells an estimated 1 million phones a year - Google’d revenue from phones is a rounding error.