... and then build/buy/lease the appropriate amount of cloud compute to be able to host it.

I mean, sure they could, but what would that expense gain them in terms customer experience?

Furthermore, as inquiries of monopoly power poke at Apple, there is likely little appetite (if there ever was) to expand their monopoly horizontally into other industries.

> I mean, sure they could, but what would that expense gain?

Giant piles of money

> in terms customer experience?

This being the top concern doesn't really mesh with the game theory of google giving them $15B. If everyone believed UX was apple's primary concern, and that google was the best option, then google would not have to pay.

Unless it makes more than 15B for Apple in terms of being able to do something with their own search (advertising?), it is a loss.

Google is paying for Apple to not have the default be Google search. If Google wasn't paying, Apple would be able to offer the default search provider to someone else or make it a user selectable choice in the new phone setup.

Google is paying to keep Apple from thinking about their own provider or shifting the default to Bing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/297137/mobile-share-of-u...

Organic search from a mobile device is 60% of all Google searches. If we take the 50/50 breakdown for iOS vs Android and apply it there, 1/3rd of all google searches are from iOS.

That's what Google is paying for - making sure that people who don't care about their search provider continue to make up 1/3 of all of their searches (and data gathering).

The next thing to consider back on that "what would the expense gain" ... does Apple have the resources to spin up a 1/3 google data center. I mean, yea they do... but that's expensive and if they aren't selling adds, it is purely an expense.

I tend to expect Apple would easily make 15B on searches just doing keyword relevance without any tracking

That would be very cuil.