What can Apple do? They could make standards-compliant USB-C audio adapters work on the iPhone 15 and up, with no NDAs, magic chips, or Apple-specific standards. (Maybe the already do?)
Since these adapters are active, I wonder if there's a slight mismatch in what the Pixel adapter advertises and what the iPhone expects. Maybe the iPhone identifies it as a USB speaker (i.e. output only)?
I also wonder who's out of spec here: My guess would be Apple (especially Google's history of pushing USB-C and even producing some open-hardware debugging tools for it), but then again I've had my Macbook struggle with a Chromebook charger, and only that charger in the past.
Would be curious to see a USB-knowledgeable person run a logic analyzer on the Pixel dongle to see what's going on.
What a surprise that is. There's no lengths that Apple won't go to to sell more dongles or overpriced airpods.
I'd also be really curious what's going on here, but you just seem to have an axe to grind. In my experience, Apple has been pretty ok at complying with standards (assuming they even implement a given one, anyway).
For example, I've had a USB-C Chromebook charger that would cycle on and off when connected to my Macbook, while several other USB-C chargers (including very particular ones like the Nintendo Switch one) were able to charge it without any problem. From my point of view, the one Google product I used was the outlier, but I wouldn't go as far as saying "Google's USB-C implementations are crap and a money grab".
So that made me even more inclined to think Apple has gimped their USBC ports to sell more dongles and airpods.
Apple created this situation, I just hope they don't feel the need to "fix it". Given their sensitivity to bad PR, I'd be very surprised if they did.