Bloomberg revealed that Microsoft planned to sell Bing to Apple in 2020.

Executives in Microsoft apparently met with Apple’s Eddy Cue for a deal, but it seemed that the talks fell through and did not proceed. Bloomberg said that Apple did not accept the terms as Google given them huge sums to make their iPhones carry it as the default search engine. Furthermore, Apple believed that Google’s search engine was superior ‘in quality and capabilities.’

Google has a multi-billion deal with Apple for the search engine to be the default on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. In 2021, both companies were passing anywhere between $4 billion to $7 billion per year. This apparently led to an antitrust trial between the DoJ and the two companies, with DoJ saying that Google enjoyed a search engine monopoly.

Apple users can still opt out of Google in favor of other available engines, including Ecosia, Yahoo, Bing, and more.