Bloomberg News reportedAround 2020, Microsoft considered selling its Bing search engine to Apple as the default search service for iOS devices.
Sources said that Microsoft executives met with Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, to discuss the possibility of selling the Bing search engine to Apple, but no further discussions followed.
At present, Apple still chooses to continue to cooperate with Google, with Google paying Apple billions of dollars each year to ensure that Google Search becomes the default search service for iOS devices and to increase the usage of Google Search services by leveraging the market share of iOS devices.
If Microsoft successfully convinces Apple to switch to Bing search engine as the default search service for iOS devices, it will enable Microsoft's search business to significantly increase its scale of development. However, Google still holds the largest share of search service usage in the market.
Apple and Google's cooperation began as early as 2002, making Google Search the default search service for Safari browsers on Mac models. This cooperation has continued to this day and has become one of Apple's major sources of revenue. This is also the reason why Apple refused to cooperate with Microsoft. Other reasons also include Apple's concern that Bing's search service performance will not be as good as Google Search.
Even so, when Apple's partnership with Google changed between 2013 and 2017, it removed all cooperation projects with Google from the default services of iOS devices, including changing the default search engine to Bing, which also became the engine technology behind the Siri digital assistant service and Spotlight search function. However, after 2017, it resumed cooperation with Google on search engine services.
Although the market had previously reported that ApplePlans to launch its own search engine serviceHowever, according to Eddy Cue, Apple doesn't need to build its own search engine technology, so it still chooses to cooperate with Google. However, compared to the previous situation where iOS devices came with Google services by default, they are now replaced by Apple's own services such as Mail and Maps.
