Comment by graeme

I think it was meant more in the sense that Apple would have a lock on phone users, which would let them monetize access to them for others such as google. They would also have been able to be more influential as an ad company.

They already do charge for making google the default browser, so it's not a stretch to imagine this payment would be larger and other similar payments would exist. I'm not sure why you think this is a hypothetical when it already happens.