However, supporting all the 'partner devices' comes with associated cost in terms of engg' development and support (somewhat like what Android must be dealing with. Android division in Google would not be a low cost division I'm sure).
It surely does, I work at a place where we also have to deal with multiple partner integrations across multiple vendors and types of devices for our products, there's some overhead for it but not nearly as much as one would expect.
One would not be able to imagine when things operate at mega scale (FAANG level), with world conquering ambitions at Exec level, and particularly in consumer domain.
I was at MS when Windows was a 'thing'. Windows was purely about software, the complexity and support requirements scales in logarithmic scale as more and more OEMs gets involved with their unique hardware, business constraints and cultures.
I work for a pretty sizeable corporation, a household name you have heard of or use products from. I don't want to dox myself too much but I can say we are not MS level of support of OEMs (because that's a quite ridiculous bar to cross, haha) but still we do have quite a few integrations across multiple consumer device types.
However, supporting all the 'partner devices' comes with associated cost in terms of engg' development and support (somewhat like what Android must be dealing with. Android division in Google would not be a low cost division I'm sure).