Speculation about plans for an Apple search engine to compete with Google has been around for many years, Apple confirmed the existence of the Applebot crawler in 2015.
Google currently pays Apple an estimated $8-12 billion per year to be the default search engine on iOS devices. In 2018, for example, the sum was estimated at a little under $10 billion – around 20% of the company’s Services income for the year. However, antitrust regulators are now putting this deal in the spotlight, and arguing that it may be anticompetitive.
This raises the question of what Apple would do if it was banned from renewing the deal, and lost that income. One suggestion has been that the iPhone maker could create an Apple search engine.