• Apple CEO Eddy Cue explained why the company hasn’t developed its own search engine.
• Google has a deal with Apple to be its default search engine, and Apple wants to keep it that way.
• The executive explained Apple’s reasoning in a filing related to the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google.

Apple says it wants to stick with what it does best, and that doesn’t include developing its own search engine.

In court papers filed this week in Washington, D.C., Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, listed the reasons why the iPhone maker doesn’t want to create its own search engine.

The filing came in connection with the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google, which argues that Google has an illegal monopoly in the search engine market. One of the DOJ’s key evidence in the trial is a revenue-sharing agreement between Google and Apple that makes Google the default search engine in Apple’s Safari browser on all of its devices. Google has been paying Apple for this status as the default search engine since 2002. Google’s payout has increased dramatically over the years, rising to around $20 billion in 2022.

According to Reuters, Apple had asked to take part in the trial to defend its partnership with Google. And in this week’s filing, Cue explained the motivation behind the deal, including why Apple is using Google’s search engine instead of developing its own.

He gave three main reasons:

1. Developing a search engine would “cost billions of dollars and take many years,” Cue said in the filing. He added that this would divert employees and capital investment from the company’s other growth areas.
2. Search is “evolving rapidly” alongside artificial intelligence, and it would be “commercially risky” to invest in it now, Cue said.
3. Search engines need a platform to sell targeted advertising, and that’s not Apple’s core business, Cue said. He said Apple also doesn’t have the staff or operational infrastructure to build a successful search advertising business. And he said it could conflict with Apple’s “longstanding privacy commitments.”

Cue said the Justice Department incorrectly assumed that Apple would develop its own search engine without a deal with Google. Cue said that is unlikely, regardless of the outcome of the case. And he warned that a blocking of Google’s revenue-sharing agreement with Apple by the U.S. Department of Justice “would harm Apple’s ability to continue to deliver products that best meet the needs of its users.”

Cue also highlighted Apple’s revenue-sharing agreements with other search engines. These include offerings that give Yahoo!, Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia access to Apple users’ Safari searches, he said.

In 2018, Apple considered buying Microsoft’s Bing search engine or investing in a multibillion-dollar deal to allow Bing to complement some of Google’s dominance on Apple devices, CNBC reported in 2023. But the deal could have ultimately soured Apple’s relationship with Google did not come through, according to the report.