Apple boosts smartphone services in a “silent war” against Google

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Apple is taking steps to decouple its mobile operating system from the features offered by Google subsidiary Alphabet, making advances in maps, search and advertising creating a collision cycle between the big tech companies.

The two Silicon Valley giants have been competitors in the smartphone market since Google acquired and popularized the Android operating system in the 2000s.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs called Android a “stolen product” that mimicked Apple’s iOS mobile software, then declared “thermonuclear war” on Google, and ousted then-search CEO Eric Schmidt from Apple’s board in 2018. 2009.

While the rivalry has been less acrimonious since then, two former Apple engineers said the iPhone maker has held a “grid” against Google ever since.

One of those people said that Apple is still fighting a “silent war” against its arch-rival. It does this by developing features that can allow the iPhone maker to separate its products from the services offered by Google. Apple did not respond to requests for comment.

The first front of this battle is mapping, which began in 2012 when Apple released Maps, replacing rival Google as the pre-downloaded app.

Apple CEO Tim Cook had to apologize for software glitches in previous versions of Maps © Cesare Abbate / EPA-EFE

The move was supposed to be a shining moment for Apple’s software ingenuity, but the launch was so difficult — some bridges, for example, looked mangled and sunk in oceans — that CEO Tim Cook said he was “very sorry for the frustration this caused our customers.” .

However, Apple Maps has improved dramatically in the past decade. Earlier this month, it announced Business Connect, a feature that allows businesses to claim their digital location so they can interact with users, display photos, and offer promotions.

This is a direct challenge to Google Maps, which partners with recommendation platform Yelp to provide similar information and generates revenue from advertising and referral fees.

Business Connect goes even further by leveraging Apple’s operating system to give iOS users unique features, such as seamless integration with Apple Pay or Business Chat, a text chat tool for commerce.

“Apple is very well positioned to further separate Google from Google, largely under the guise of consumer privacy,” said Corey Mönchbach, CEO of BlueConic, a customer data platform.

The second front in the battle is research. While Apple rarely discusses products during development, the company has long worked on a feature known internally as “Apple Search,” a tool that facilitates “billions of searches” per day, according to staff on the project.

Apple’s search team dates back at least to 2013, when it acquired Topsy Labs, a startup that indexed Twitter to enable searches and analytics. This technology is used every time an iPhone user asks Apple’s voice assistant Siri for information, types queries from the Home screen, or uses the Mac’s “Spotlight” search feature.

Apple’s search offering has been bolstered by the purchase of Laserlike, an AI startup founded by ex-Google engineers who describe its mission as providing “high-quality information and diverse perspectives on any topic from the entire web.”

Apple could quickly eliminate Google’s 92 percent share of the search market by not making Google the default for its 1.2 billion iPhone users, said Josh Koenig, chief strategy officer at Pantheon, a web-based operations platform.

“If Apple could build something that was basically as good as ‘Google Classic’ — Google circa 2010 when it was a simple search engine that was less optimized for ad revenue — people might just prefer it,” Koenig said.

This will be costly, however. Alphabet pays Apple between $8 billion and $12 billion a year for Google to be the default search engine on iOS, according to the US Department of Justice.

Still, replacing Google on the iPhone, and assuring users that their web inquiries won’t leak to third-party data brokers, would align well with Apple’s privacy-focused software changes and marketing campaign — with the potential to be a huge hit for Google’s business.

Apple hopes to rival Google Maps, which makes money from advertising and referral fees © Justine Bonnery / Hans Lucas via Reuters

Since it launched a privacy policy in April 2021 that denied companies like Facebook and Snap the ease of creating user profiles and tracking their actions from one app to another, engagements at those companies have collapsed by 58% and 84%, respectively.

“Google could still be a better search engine, but if I wanted to research my likelihood of having cancer, who would you prefer to get that information from?” said Anshu Sharma, CEO of data privacy platform Skyflow.

The third front in Apple’s battle may be the most devastating: its online advertising ambitions, where Alphabet generates more than 80 percent of its revenue.

Last summer, Apple posted a post on its job pages for someone to “push the design of the most advanced and personalized application platform as possible.” DSP is a digital media buying tool that allows advertisers to buy ad inventory on multiple exchanges.

The job posting was indicative of Apple’s desire to build a new ad network, one that would reshape the way ads are delivered to iPhone users and keep third-party data brokers out of the loop.

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The role was filled in September by Keith Weisburg as Group Product Manager for Ad Platforms. Weisburg, who also spent a decade at Google and YouTube, was a senior product manager at Amazon DSP.

Apple’s move on three fronts has left Alphabet’s position within iOS looking “more vulnerable than it did before,” said Andrew Liebesman, an analyst with Insider Intelligence.

“Apple is increasingly incentivized to get into search as it builds up its advertising arm. Search is the key to a huge pool of first-party data, and this is the new battleground for the future of digital advertising.”

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