Google wants to track your iPhone—here’s why…
Suddenly all becomes clear. The punchy Apple ads that emerged a few weeks ago with a not-so-subtle warning to avoid Google Chrome. This is part of something bigger, something more serious, with 300 million iPhone users caught in the middle.
Google wants iPhone users to switch from Apple’s apps to its own, bringing those users further inside its data machine on a daily basis. If you switch to Chrome as your default browser, then one way or another you’ll be tracked. That’s how it works.
Google has reportedly set itself a target—to grow the share of iPhone searches using its own apps from the current 30% to 50%. Applying an overly simplistic calculation, that equates to around 700 million of the 1.4 billion iPhones regularly using Google’s own apps—largely Chrome—for search instead of Safari. Install Chrome on your iPhone and you’ll see it push you to make it the default. Google needs almost 300 million more iPhone users to adopt Chrome over Safari to make this work.
Those Safari Vs Chrome ads and Apple’s messaging are interesting for a number of reasons. The mixed-up relationship between the two mobile ecosystem giants. Apple warning about Chrome and Google pushing Apple into RCS, the on/off Gemini affair with iOS 18. But above all—because this is about browsers—that Google pays Apple billions for the default search spot on Safari, with both reaping the collective spoils.
So, is Safari really any better than when it comes tracking than Chrome. In short—yes. Google’s business model relies on tracking and collating user data to shape and sell advertising. And while Apple clearly reaps the benefits—from its revenue share with Google as much as anything else, Safari better protects your privacy than Chrome, especially when it comes to user fingerprinting and third-party tracking.
If you use Google Search within Safari, you are submitting to Google’s machine through those search queries and results. But iPhone users are well protected from cross-site tracking, despite Google’s delays in killing third-party cookies. Tracking protection is a universal setting on iOS, and if you have elected not to be tracked that applies to Chrome as well. But if you’re using Chrome then you’re inside Google’s machine, and it can see what you do without any need for third-party cookies.
Google generates huge revenues from search, and with iPhone users broadly earning more and spending more, that search spot is lucrative in the extreme. But search is changing with the drive to AI, even as the US DOJ continues an investigation into alleged monopolistic Google search behavior, including the iPhone arrangement.
The reason we know Apple was hitting out at Chrome with those ads, despite not mentioning Chrome or Google by name, is that there are only two mobile browsers that matter—Chrome and Safari, with a better than 90% lock on the market. But only around 30% of iPhone owners use Chrome, and that’s a serious issue for Google.
If Google loses/ends the Apple Safari gig, then it needs to change its approach and quickly. The company will need to replace 70% of the revenue it currently takes from iPhone search. That’s a lot to drop into an Apple/Google tug-of-war.
Apple does not want even the current 30% of iPhone users choosing Chrome over Safari, never mind half its core iPhone base. And so that Safari privacy messaging, despite the irony of Safari baking in Google Search (for now), makes total sense.
Apple’s challenge is that this is all a bit of a mess. Users prefer Google Search to the alternatives. Apple’s own reported analysis submitted in that DOJ case confirm as much. And as the iPhone maker saw with Google Maps, switching its users from Google’s apps is not easy or popular and awkward u-turns could follow.
But Apple has played the privacy card successfully before. Those Safari ads are just the start and will ramp up if Google and Apple do lessen their web search arrangement and battle more openly for iPhone user searches.
For now, most Apple users have a decent balance. Google’s market-leading search within Apple’s better-than Chrome Safari shell. That could be about to change, at least as a default setup. A browser war is now underway between the industry’s two heavyweights, and your iPhone is their battleground.
Watch this space…