> Right now, if an Apple executive asks, "How does Apple make money working on Safari?"
It doesn’t need to make money. A good web browser is a standard part of an operating system these days. Apple can’t ship without one. You might as well ask how they monetise Finder or Notes.
A browser that is just good enough for people not to notice that web apps work better on a $50 android then on their $1000 iPhone is a standard part of an operating system these days.
Apple never fully owned WebKit in the first place - most certainly not back in 2003. There was an extremely public and messy divorce period with the KDE codebase[0], and to this day there's still KHTML/KJS-derived code in WebKit that has to be sublicensed under GPLv2 for redistribution purposes.
If we're going to split hairs over the whole "Blink is an inferior WebKit fork" brouhaha, we shouldn't forget who Apple sherlocked to get there. After all, turnabout is fair play.
Finder and Notes are artificially and arbitrarily designed to hook into iCloud first and refuse any convenient synchronization with other cloud platforms. It is pretty easily argued that these apps are designed like this to upsell Apple iCloud subscriptions, not because it's easier or smarter to do that way.
Similarly, Safari isn't clouds and rainbows either. It serves the same purpose IE did back in the day; furnish a "premium" experience that is deliberately irreplaceable and intertwined with the OS. We saw this with the push notification API, "Add to Homescreen" functionality and so many other places where Apple dragged their feet and refused a featureset that would enable competition with native apps. This is a hell of their own making, Apple can leave any time they want by acquiescing to app publishers the same way they did on Mac.
It doesn’t need to make money. A good web browser is a standard part of an operating system these days. Apple can’t ship without one. You might as well ask how they monetise Finder or Notes.