Apple engineered a situation in which true browser competition was not allowed on iOS, making Safari's terrible platform the best anyone could get.
Having defanged browser competition, they leveraged Safari to extract monopolistic rents. That it *also* protected the App Store from real competition was a nice-to-have:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/11/23913287/us-v-google-apple-search-deal