Google Paid Apple $1 Billion To Remain The Default Search Engine On iPhone
Short Bytes: In 2014, Google paid Apple $1 billion to remain the default search engine on iPhone, according to a new revelation by Bloomberg. In the past, both companies have tried hard to keep the details of this deal a secret, calling it “highly sensitive”.
This unknown fact was recently unmasked during a court hearing regarding Oracle’s lawsuit against Google over the Java copyright dispute. The documents produced in the court on January 14 showed that Google paid Apple $1 billion in 2014 to remain the default search engine on the iPhone, according to a report from Bloomberg.
The report indicated that Google agreed to share its revenue coming from iPhones. “At one point in time the revenue share [between Apple and Google] was 34 percent,” a court heard. However, the specific details of this deal are still unclear and we don’t know that 34 percent share belonged which company.
This shows the extreme lengths Google can go to establish itself as the default search engine on the world’s most popular smartphone. The report also reveals the massive amount of money Apple makes from Google’s advertisement model — something Apple CEO Tim Cook has criticized at numerous public platforms.
In the past, both companies have tried hard to keep the details of this deal a secret, calling it “highly sensitive”. “The specific financial terms of Google’s agreement with Apple are highly sensitive to both Google and Apple. Both Apple and Google have always treated this information as extremely confidential,” Bloomberg reports a filing from Google.
In 2014, Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, tried to get Yahoo to be the default search engine on iPhone, but she didn’t succeed. Notably, Apple has also used Microsoft’s Bing for assisting Siri in iOS for some time. But, that didn’t last long, thanks to the super heavy $1 billion from Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
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