For example, they'd make a deal with Samsung that if they want Google services on Samsung phones, Samsung had to agree to not let anyone else put competing app stores or payment processing other than Samsung's own and Google's own.

Where-as Apple it's more seen that they simply are not letting competitors put their alternatives on their own Phones, which isn't seen as anti-competitive, but more as how Apple itself competes.

And probably Google also internally used bad language that talked more about how to prevent competitors, etc. that might have been more incriminating.

So I think they see it more like if CocaCola told Walgreens they won't sell Coke products at Walgreens if Walgreens caries Pepsi products. Where Coke is seen as such a big player, that their leading market position forces Walgreens to agree, because not selling Coke would harm them financially so much due to the market leading position of Coke, but also it's seen as a anti-competitive agreement from Coke.

If you have strict rules form the get go while you’re a nobody in the relevant market, then you’re free to maintain those strict rules even if you all of a sudden became a big player (although you can’t become more strict). This is in part because the assumption is that if your rules would’ve been too strict, then you would’ve never been able to become a dominant market player, because nobody would’ve wanted to deal with you.

If on the other hand you were open and didn’t have strict rules in place but you start changing your tune once you’re big and powerful then it could be explained as you abusing your power (i.e. luring people in with relaxed rules, only to turn up the thumbscrews once everyone depends on you).

Apple has always had a walled garden with strict rules and a 30% commission, and despite that many were happy to join. Since then they’ve not turned up the thumbscrews, in fact they’ve done the opposite by lowering the commission for the vast majority of developers. The flip side is that they can’t go stricter and to a higher commission from here because they are too dominant now.

That’s also in part why Apple has all these hills they’re willing to die on, anything they concede now, they can never undo or return to.

They don’t have the flexibility of testing a 5% commission for example and see if that works better, because the moment they decide it didn’t work out for them and they increase it back to 15% or 30%, it can be explained as an abuse of dominance because of the people that joined in, and became dependent on them, during that test.

Smaller companies can try new pricing strategies, new monetisation strategies, etc. Sure when they announce that from now on their “free plan” is discontinued some customers might moan and complain, but they never have to worry about government intervention on the basis of antitrust.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/18/third-party-app-stores-apple-...

I don't know if it really makes sense, but that's my understanding of these two verdict when held in contrast.

Google claimed to be open and weren’t

This is a huge win for them, because you can rest assured Google will get a ton of concessions out of the states in exchange of paying the fine. It's not even high enough to make Google feel "let's never do this again" – it wouldn't be for Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, any of these guys.

It should be in the order tens of billions or a hefty amount of their revenue, whichever is greater. Google must be celebrating such a low fine.

The tl;dr is that the jury determined that "android app distribution" is the relevent market, and google has lots of dodgy emails where they stifled competition in it. There is no "ios app distribution" market.