The Epic v. Apple trial showed that no one got special deals. And Epic v. Google did show Google gave many companies special deals, like Spotify. Ironically that played a big part with the jury deciding against Google.
What are the differences between using AVPlayer and MPV?
AVPlayer is a system player component delivered by Apple. It provides best efficiency, performance and system integrations, but number of playable videos formats is limited. This means for Invidious/Piped videos the maximum resolution you can play with it is 1080p. There's no way to play higher resolution files as they are not provided in the right formats. Obviously, modern Apple devices are more than capable to hardware decode and play these formats. And in fact, Apple seems to be giving special entitlement to Google that allows them to enable VP9/AV1 formats decoding. Just remember that next time you hear how Apple treats all developers equally.
It’s from 2020 so it might’ve changed but it proves Apple gives certain apps special privileges. Who knows which other apps are given privileges and to what extent?
