[izacus]

The fact that lack of Safari features drives people through taxed AppStore is just an accidental Apple side effect right? ;)

Google is utterly evil for driving people towards web Ads for profit, while Apple drives people into their 30% tax AppStore by pure altruistic battery concerns?

[mike_hearn]

It seems more like a difference of vision. Apple has a popular desktop and mobile OS. It's fundamental to what the company is. For Google they have Android on mobile, but ChromeOS didn't take off in a big way on the desktop, so Chrome has become their desktop "OS" in effect.

From Apple's perspective a lot of stuff being added to Chrome is just duplication. They have a competent desktop OS already and it's not cheap to build, so why would they get talked into building what amounts to a second competing OS just because it suits Google? It's maybe like asking why Google doesn't build super slick native Mac app equivalents for everything they offer. Why isn't there a native Google Maps app on macOS for example? Of course from Google's perspective that sounds unreasonable - they've got their own platform and would rather use it, why would they invest so much into Apple's? It's sort of the same thing but in reverse.

[sanxiyn]

Google did build Google Earth for macOS. I am not sure whether this supports or opposes your points. Probably supports.

[mike_hearn]

Google Earth was an acquisition and long pre-dates Chrome. They later phased it out in favor of a web app which, IIRC, at first only ran in Chrome.

[password4321]

I tried to avoid speculating.

I believe we agree: control is a strong ulterior motive with both pros (prioritizing privacy; Flash is dead) and cons (native app required for important functionality).