Apple just doesn’t want to use Bing (like, at all)

As you know, when you buy an Apple device, the default search engine is Google. This isn’t because the two companies are best friends. It’s because Google drops billions of dollars every year to make that so. Well, according to a new report, Apple would not take Bing search as the default, even if it paid.

Google and Apple have a complicated relationship. Their phones and operating systems couldn’t be bigger rivals. However, Google posts its apps to the Apple App Store, Apple trained its model on Google’s cloud servers, and Apple is planning on integrating Gemini into Apple AI among other examples. It’s just business at the end of the day.

Thanks to the recent massive antitrust lawsuit against the search giant, we found out that Google paid Apple about $26 billion in 2021 to make Google its default search engine. That’s enough money to buy 14,452,473 Pixel 9 Pro Folds.

Apple doesn’t want to use Bing search at all

It’s no little-known fact that Google is the largest search engine in the world. It owns more than 91% of the search engine market. We’re sure that much of that traffic comes from iPhone users. Despite how Google’s been messing up the search algorithm, Apple seems bent on keeping Google around.

Microsoft has also thrown its hat into the ring to make Bing the default browser on iPhones, but the company wasn’t having it. Apple’s Senior VP of services said in a statement, “I don’t believe there’s a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us. They offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company.” Those are some harsh words.

While Google has its issues, Apple deems it a much better search engine than Bing. It brings the question: what could actually be proper competition for Google? When Microsoft first introduced Bing AI (now Copilot), the company saw a spike in usage, but that wasn’t enough to take enough of a bite out of Google’s pie. Also, with the way Google has been fumbling both its search engine and AI, we’d think that the company would start to see a decline in usage. However, that’s not the case. Only time will tell if some company will come around and make a difference.