For YEARS to come, carriers refused to rectify this skewed market, so while Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, Samsung, LG had to continue jumping through hoops and could only earn money at the point of sale, while Apple's monthly income accumulated based on the total amount of active devices.

In the end, it also wasn't the carriers who rectified that situation either. After Apple was technically ready to support more carriers, they moved away from their "one carrier per country" exclusivity-model, so they also had to concede on revenue-share compensation.

But by that time Apple already had the search-deal with Google, so revenue-share continued to from the search-traffic generated in Safari.

All of those were genius moves, disrupting the economy of an industry which separated the product from provided services, ultimately gaining total control over the user and all services provided, degrading the carrier to a mere ISP (who was even happy about it because the average revenue per user was higher).

Nonetheless, it destroyed the entire mobile phone ecosystem (especially outside of US, where market-forces were less in control of the carriers)