I would imagine Apple is a big enough company to weather these troubles and eventually get something out of it. It seems at the scale of their iphone sales, it would still make sense to keep sinking billions more into this than have to pay the Qualcomm tax forever.
Seems unlikely for them of open source the engine as they’re switching away from it. Why give away all that dev time and effort and not gain any benefit from it? While I think it’s the correct move to open source it and let the community take over development, a for profit company is never gonna do that unless they would benefit. Like open sourcing the engine while still using it so you get a wider amount of devs throwing their efforts in. So for a company, they get “free” dev work, and in return for those same devs get to use the engine on whatever project they want without licensing issues. Open sourcing abandoned or depreciated software, especially game engines, really is a dead legacy of a simpler time in computing. Gone are the days of companies like ID open sourcing their engines and games once their release cycle was done. With the advent of always online and games as a service, we’ll never seen major companies ever release old games as open source since even a 40 year old game can be monetized in a modern digital store.