Exactly. Users have to manually download Chrome yet it has a 70% market share. Changing the search engine on mobile is already easy enough, far easier than installing a browser. Google will get a majority of its share back, while Apple will get nothing.

> Google will get a majority of its share back, while Apple will get nothing.

Then you would have to ask, if people would only switch back to Google anyway, why is Google paying them currently? Depriving Apple of the incentive to develop a competing search engine good enough for people to willingly use.

Honestly it's the only logical conclusion.

Otherwise the terms of the deal are terrible for Google

Google has a strong position in search, and pushes Chrome every time you hit their top level page. Also Chrome is the default on Android, yeah? I don't think you can extrapolate from that market share to determine how likely people are to change browsers.

The parent's market share claim is for desktop OSes, where Android is irrelevant.

It's still far easier to not install chrome than it is to install it: downloading a thing, running the downloaded thing, click through all the dialogs, ignore all of Windows's nags to stick with Edge (which is probably a greater abuse of platform control than advertising on the search page), ...

I think a lot of companies switched to pushing Chrome via device management during the later IE days and never switched back. Presumably that's a decent chunk of market

Ah, my error -- thank you!

Not on iPhone. Chrome has 30% market share.

Because Chrome isn't a thing on iPhone. It's Safari webview with a very thin layer of Chrome branding around it. Users have very little incentive to switch. And considering Google search is the default on both, Google doesn't have much of an incentive to push users either.

Google doesn’t care about Chromium (the engine) being on iOS. They care most about getting user data from people using Chrome on iOS.

If so, why is Google paying Apple billions? Insurance against the risk that that isn’t true? Seems like an expensive insurance…

If the revenue is worth the cost, why leave it to chance?

Internet Explorer seemed impossible to beat when it was packed in with Windows, and yet Chrome is now the dominant browser.

I'm sure that isn't lost on Google. The change might not happen overnight but why even let it start if you can afford not to.

The payoff disincentivizes Apple from competing and ensures Google does not need to compete. I would assume there's also some kind of exclusivity such that Apple is also incentivized to promote Google search over others.

Google would likely win the melee but not without unknown effort. Loss of users + risk + higher maintenance cost is all part of the equation.

They might, if Google hadn't enshittified their own product over the last few years. At this point, I will at least listen to anyone who says they're willing to take search seriously again.

It was Google's game to lose, and they seem to be trying their hardest to do just that, without any help from competitors or the government.