We covered the AppleBot directives documentation before, back in May. But what I didn’t know is that AppleBot is unique in that if you do not make any mention of directives for AppleBot but you do for GoogleBot, it will follow the GoogleBot directives you set up. Bing, Yahoo, etc, do not do the same, they follow general directives or directives detailed for their bots but not for GoogleBot.

John Mueller said this on Google+:

I didn’t know it was a unique thing but John would know and he mentioned it.

The official AppleBot page says so:

This is specifically for Universal Search and App Deep Linking I believe – at least for now.

Forum discussion at Google+.