Apple is reportedly working to oust Google from iPhones and iPads. The company appears to be well on the way to challenging its opponent for supremacy in map service, search and, above all, advertising.
Apple’s only serious opponent when it comes to mobile operating systems is Google, since 2008 the HTC T-Mobile G1, the first Android smartphone, competed against the iPhone. The days of shrill tones, martial declarations of war and epic patent battles are over, but secretly Apple is continuing the war against its archenemy, two former employees of the group revealed to the “Financial Times”. The fight is primarily about using Google’s own services to sell iPhones.
Apple has been trying to counter Google Maps with its own map service since 2012. The start in 2012 was anything but successful, especially visually Apple Maps was a medium catastrophe. That has now changed radically. In the USA in particular, the service is now equivalent in most areas, and sometimes even superior in detail.
Now, with Business Connect, Apple is also well on its way to getting in the way of Google’s important business with businesses in Maps. Because this is a function with which companies can present themselves in the service and interact with customers.
According to the Financial Times, Business Connect is a frontal attack on Google Maps, which works with referral platform Yelp to offer similar information and generate revenue from advertising and referral fees. Apple has the advantage of being able to integrate special iOS features such as Apple Pay or Business Chat from the news app.
The second line of battle is search, Google’s core business. Josh Koenig told Business Magazine that Apple could take a decent chunk out of Google’s 92 percent share of the search market. He is chief strategist at Pantheon, an operating platform for websites. To do this, it must be achieved that Google is no longer the standard search on 1.2 billion iPhones worldwide, according to Koenig. This is possible with a search engine that is as good as Google but less focused on advertising.
Apple would have to pay dearly for success. According to the US Department of Justice, Google’s parent Alphabet pays Apple between $8 billion and $12 billion a year to keep Google as the default search engine in iOS. On the other hand, replacing Google with an Apple search and promising not to share user data for advertising purposes would go well with privacy-focused software changes and Apple’s privacy-focused marketing campaigns, writes the Financial Times. At the same time, Google would be hit hard.
Far more dangerous for Alphabet could be Apple’s work on a privacy-friendly Demand Side Platform (DSP). Because it’s about the business with online advertising, which is the main source of income for the Android provider at 80 percent. Using a DSP, companies can easily compare the prices of online advertising space on different marketplaces. Keith Weisburg has been responsible for DSP development at Apple since September 2022. He worked for Google for a long time and was also head of DSP at Amazon.
By expanding its advertising business, Apple is increasingly pushing into the search business, Inside Intelligence analyst Andrew Lipsman told the Financial Times. And search is the key to huge amounts of first-party data, i.e. data generated by the company itself. “This is the new battleground for the future of digital advertising.”