Yes, but in a weird way: Apple doesn't allow competition for phone manufacturing for their ecosystem, so the equivalent of "deals with manufacturers" are entirely internal. Fostering a phone ecosystem that overall has more competition has hurt Google here.
Google didn’t need to pay these companies either. They chose to do it so they could keep their play store monopoly. And they may have just burning billions in profits because of it
I'm sure they did their own stuff, but Apple got away with a very nasty one. So I don't think competition law works. Results look completely random, like tossing a coin.
Being sued for different things - yeah you tend to get different results.
And what is the definition of nasty here? It's very subjective. Apple doesn't own the mobile market and are below 50% control of it so they are not really a monopoly. I'm also not sure how you can use anti-trust or anti-monopoly against them when they have been found again and again to not be a monopoly.
Banning competing browsers is illegal and Apple should have never gotten away with it. Not only an abstract absolute monopoly is a problem. Apple has a lot of leverage on the industry and is causing harm to the market with anti-competitive behavior.
For a second I thought you just posted the same link but that was very informative. It's just me but I think Google deleting all the chats automatically about the topics involved would have had me planted deep suspicion about motive in my mind.
https://www.theverge.com/23959932/epic-v-google-trial-antitr...