Google is being tried in the United States for alleged monopolistic practices and one of the most important points of the case is the millionaire that Google pays to Apple for being the default search engine of the iPhone and the rest of the company’s devices. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has recently testified and revealed an idea he presented to Apple, which they did not accept.
In the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google we are discovering some very interesting things. Like, although Apple has everything it needs to launch a search engine to compete with Google, it just doesn’t want to do it. And today we get this curious idea that Google’s CEO proposed to Tim Cook, his counterpart at Apple.
A Google search app preinstalled on the iPhone
A large part of the money Apple receives from Google comes proportionally from the searches made by its users. That is, Apple gets a share of the advertising revenue from every search that is performed on Google from one of its devices. However, in 2018 Apple noticed something that turned the tables and prompted several meetings.
Google’s overall revenue was growing at a much faster rate than the revenue Apple was getting from Google through the search deal. According to Sundar Pichai’s testimony, Apple expressed those concerns to Google, and they offered different ideas and suggestions. Among them, pre-installing a Google app on the iPhone:
We said that one of the things that works well on Android, which drives higher usage, is a Google search app. So I proposed that we could create a Google search app for iOS… and commit to supporting the product for many years to come.
The goal of this app would have been to create something that people would associate with Google, rather than Apple focusing on Siri and Spotlight search results. However, the idea did not seem to convince Tim Cook, who pointed out that the two companies “had different strengths.”
Google already has a dedicated iPhone and iPad app, but Pichai’s idea was apparently to do something that was more integrated with the overall iOS experience. Basically, they wanted there to be something from Google pre-installed on the iPhone that users would recognize.
This is not the first time this has happened. Early versions of iOS came with pre-installed Google apps like Google Maps or YouTube. Something that disappeared years later making these apps downloadable from the App Store. The idea could have been completely revolutionary, however it seems that Apple does not want to depend so much on Google.