From the business perspective, Apple probably doesn’t care about selling the tags, the real value is in making the iPhone experience better. So if a user buys a tile tracker and it works better on iOS because of the iPhone network, that’s a win for them.
Yeah, Apple doesn't seem to have much interest in selling little plastic tiles to people.
They've avoided selling their own HomeKit gear, they're licensing AirPlay to be put in TVs so people don't have to buy AppleTVs, and they stopped selling routers long ago. Even when it comes to dongles which everyone thinks Apple loves selling, they have a meager selection and have outsourced many of them (e.g. they don't have a first-party USB-C Ethernet dongle)
With the MFi Program, they still make lots of money on third-party products, without all of that costly R&D and support on their own end.
But it will wipe out Tile, unless I am missing something. Apple's solution would instantly make all iPhones into tag detectors, which is a vast improvement over the current Tile situation where only Tile customers' phones are tag detectors. Seems like the only answer for Tile is to get integrated with Apple's solution.
Tiles main business model is selling the hardware. They can sell an apple compatible version which will work incredibly and light years ahead of their current product, and then keep selling the base version for android users.