Something like 90%+ of the profit from smartphones goes to Apple — if that’s not the upper hand then I don’t know what is. Apple makes profit. Google has a legion of devices with incentives to keep insecure so they can monitor and harvest the data to both serve and sell ads.
That's not the upper hand. The upper hand is having the installed base needed to be able to push through product changes that undermine your competitors' strategic position. Things like being able to continuously track the location of each of your ~2B customers so that you know who is hanging out with whom and can build the social graph that another one of your primary competitors spent a decade curating - or, for that matter, that the KGB causes major diplomatic incidents trying to build.
I think that in this particular case, Google overreached, it's an inconvenience to them, and they'll roll it back. In the general case, though, Google's got way more power than Apple (and more than most nation-states) and they just haven't been called on it yet.
It's the upper hand in certain regions. Last I checked Apple has majority market share in Japan, think it was 60% or more. Google definitely stand to lose something and clearly its worthwhile if they are paying billions per year.
If google was so confident it had the “upper hand” with android and its 2B users why would it pay an estimated 9 billion to Apple [1] to remain the default search engine on iOS? That screams desperation to me.
[1]https://www.google.com/amp/s/9to5mac.com/2018/09/28/google-p...
