I don't get it. You can deploy apps when you pay both Google and Apple or you can work without a paid subscription if you are just a developer dabbling at home.

The vertical integration is true but that also has been the case with Microsoft products. Google basically doesn't have it's own desktop platform until pretty recently, of course their tools ran on other desktop platforms otherwise they wouldn't have any.

It's nice to install other browsers on Android though. Using Firefox wherever I can.