I was talking about BTLE support on the iPhones (which where basically the first to have it).

Though, only a few Android phones support ANT+. (It seems that a few Android phones have ANT+ support turned-off but can be "hacked" to turn it on.)

Smartphones have to support BT. They don't have to support ANT+.

There's a licensing fee to use ANT+. I believe it applies to recievers (but it might only apply to transmitters).

BT is much more universal. Many more things use it and it's used for many more different things. (If there's a licensing fee associated with BT, it's irrelevant because phones have to support it.)

ANT+ is much more of a niche thing. I'd expect that support for it is going to be more hit-or-miss.

As far as I understand, it's easy to support BTLE (smart) and ANT+ on the same chip. The reason not to support ANT+ is extra cost to service a small market.

As far as I understand, ANT+ isn't better than BTLE (the design of BTLE was "informed" by ANT+).

It might make sense phase-out ANT+ and use BTLE but you'd need Garmin's cooperation for that (think "snowballs in hell").