Who Actually Pays Whom Inside Your Phone?

I went to see the new Spider-Man film waiting for the black goo.

You know the stuff. The symbiote — the alien that finds a host, moves in, and starts making decisions. I sat through the whole thing expecting it to show up. It never did.

What stuck with me afterwards wasn’t the disappointment. It was the idea itself, which is a genuinely strange one when you look at it directly: a thing that attaches to something larger, lives off it, and leaves you unable to say cleanly whether the host is being helped or fed on. The word symbiote covers mutualism, commensalism and parasitism all at once. It refuses to tell you which one you’re looking at.

Which is roughly where I’d got to with Apple, Google and Samsung.

Because here’s the thing I actually wanted to know. Open Safari on an iPhone, type into the bar at the top, and Google answers. You didn’t choose that. I certainly didn’t — I’ve never opened Settings and picked a search engine in my life, and neither has anyone I know.

Somebody decided it for me. And when a default is worth having, somebody generally pays for it.

So: who pays whom? Three companies, a vague sense that money moves between them somehow, and no idea of the direction or the size of any of it.

I got both of my starting assumptions wrong before I got near an answer.

Two things I had backwards

“Apple probably charges Google. Or Google charges Apple. Hard to say.” It is not hard to say, and the amount is absurd. Google pays Apple. In 2022 it paid $20 billion.

“Samsung makes Apple’s screens. Or is it LG?” Both. And a third. For the iPhone 17 line as of late 2025: Samsung Display around 64.5%, LG Display 34.1%, BOE 1.4%. Not either/or — a majority supplier and a substantial second, with a third kept around for reasons I’ll come back to.

The tidy explanation, which is wrong

Once you learn that Google pays Apple twenty billion dollars a year, and that Samsung builds most of Apple’s screens, a conclusion arrives almost automatically. It arrived for me:

The rivalry is theatre. Behind the keynotes they’re all in business together. Competition in phones is a story sold to consumers.

It’s clean, it’s cynical, and it feels like the sort of thing that ought to be true. It’s also wrong, and it’s wrong in a specific way that’s more interesting than the tidy version.

Break one: the money runs in the direction that proves rivalry

Google doesn’t pay Apple the way partners split a bill. It pays the way you pay someone who could hurt you.

An internal Google analysis from 2020, dragged into daylight by the antitrust trial, estimated what would happen if Google lost the Apple default: a revenue loss of $28.2 to $32.7 billion, and the disappearance of 60–80% of search query volume on Apple devices.

That’s the number Google is defending. Twenty billion a year to avoid a thirty billion dollar hole is not a partnership. It’s a ransom, and a sensibly priced one.

The mechanism confirms it. The payment isn’t a flat fee — it’s a revenue share, 36% of the search advertising revenue Google earns through Safari, which in 2022 came to that $20 billion. Apple’s Eddy Cue confirmed the figure in court. It started at zero in 2002 and passed a billion dollars a month by May 2021.

Per year, drawn to scale

Google pays Apple
search default $20,000M

Apple pays Google
Gemini for Siri $1,000M

And here’s the part that settles it. Microsoft wanted that slot badly enough to offer Apple 90% of Bing’s advertising revenue — not a share, nearly all of it — and reportedly as much as $15 billion a year. It offered to hide the Bing brand entirely so Apple’s users would never see it. Apple said no.

You don’t turn down 90% of something unless the 36% you’re already getting is worth more. Which means Google is paying a genuinely competitive price for a genuinely contestable thing.

Satya Nadella, testifying about Apple’s position: “Whoever they choose, they basically king-make.”

Break two: it’s load-bearing

Twenty billion dollars is an amount that’s hard to feel. So here’s the version that lands.

In 2020, Google’s payments were 17.5% of Apple’s operating income.

Apple's operating income, 2020

17.5% a cheque from Google for doing nothing Everything else Apple did

Not one percent. Not a useful side deal. Close to a fifth of the profit of the most valuable company on earth, arriving for a decision made once and then not revisited.

Apple didn’t have to design anything, manufacture anything, or ship anything to earn it. It had to not change a setting.

Break three: the fiercest fight ran on top of the deepest supply deal

This is the fact that broke my tidy explanation properly.

Apple sued Samsung in April 2011, accusing it of slavishly copying the iPhone. Within a year the fight had spread to roughly 30 cases across four continents. In May 2018 a jury awarded Apple $539 million. A month later, on 27 June 2018, it ended in a confidential global settlement — all claims dismissed with prejudice, each side paying its own costs, nobody admitting anything.

Seven years of the most expensive patent war in consumer technology.

Now the other timeline. Through those same years, Samsung was manufacturing the processors inside iPhones. The A4, A5, A6 and A7 were designed by Apple and fabricated in Samsung’s foundries. Samsung built the chip at the centre of the product it was being sued for copying. TSMC only took over at the A8 in 2014 — and then Apple came back to Samsung in 2015, dual-sourcing the A9 between the two, while the lawsuits were still running.

Fabricating for Apple, and being sued by Apple

Made by Samsung 2010–16

Suing Samsung 2011–18

201120142018

For perspective on the $539 million: over the period it spent suing, Apple made more than $300 billion in net profit. The damages were a rounding error. The chips were not.

The same ruthlessness, pointed the other way

If you think that makes these companies friends, watch what happens when the numbers stop working.

Google used Samsung’s foundry for the Tensor chips in every Pixel from the first through the G4. Then it left. The Pixel 10’s Tensor G5 is fabricated by TSMC, and reporting from Seoul described the loss as a “shock” that prompted Samsung’s semiconductor division to run an internal review of how it lost a long-standing customer. Reported yields tell the story: Samsung’s 3nm process around 50%, TSMC’s around 90%.

Apple does it too, more coldly. Industry sources describe BOE’s real function in Apple’s supply chain as pricing leverage — a third supplier whose value isn’t the panels it ships but the price it forces Samsung and LG to quote. BOE shipped 1.4% of iPhone 17 screens. Its job is to exist, so the other two have to bid as though they could lose the work.

That’s not a cartel. That’s a knife fight conducted through procurement.

And now the money reverses

In January 2026, Apple and Google issued a joint statement: the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology, powering a rebuilt Siri.

Neither company disclosed the terms. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has reported the figure at around $1 billion a year, for a custom model of roughly 1.2 trillion parameters against the 150-billion-parameter model Apple was running. Every site repeating that number is citing the same single story, so hold it loosely — but the arrangement itself is confirmed by both companies.

So the arrow now points both ways. Google pays Apple to be the search box. Apple pays Google to be the brain.

Whose glass are you actually looking at?

While we’re counting: the screen.

Who made the iPhone 17's screen

Samsung 64.5% LG 34.1% BOE 1.4%

And it’s getting deeper, not shallower. In August 2025 Apple announced that Samsung would supply chips from its Austin, Texas plant for Apple products including the iPhone — reportedly three-layer stacked image sensors, displacing Sony as Apple’s camera sensor supplier. Apple left Samsung’s foundry in 2014 and came back in 2025.

The Android inversion

One more, because it’s the fact that most reliably surprises people.

Samsung does not meaningfully pay Google for Android. Android is open source; any manufacturer can take it and ship it for free. Licensing fees exist only for Google Mobile Services — the Play Store, Maps, the Google apps — and mainly in Europe after the EU’s antitrust fine, at up to $40 per device.

Meanwhile, Google paid Samsung $8 billion over four years to keep Search, the Play Store and Assistant as the defaults on Galaxy phones. Samsung accounted for more than half of all Google Play revenue. Google’s own 2019 internal project to defend Play against Samsung’s Galaxy Store opened with the line: “Existential Question — How do we continue to keep Play as the preeminent distribution platform for Android.”

And from January 2025, with the Galaxy S25, Google began paying Samsung again — this time so that long-pressing the power button opens Gemini instead of Bixby. A fixed monthly payment per device plus a share of Gemini’s advertising revenue. The amount has never been disclosed; a Department of Justice lawyer would say only that it was “an enormous sum of money.”

So Samsung uses Google’s operating system for free, and is paid billions for the privilege.

What’s actually going on

Three companies, each a near-monopolist at a different layer of the same object.

Apple owns the customer relationship. Google owns search, and now frontier AI. Samsung owns the panels and the memory. Nobody can dislodge anybody at their own layer — Apple can’t build a search engine that matters, Google can’t sell a phone that matters, Samsung can’t own a customer the way Apple does.

So they don’t try. They buy access to each other’s layers instead.

Payment is what competition looks like when neither side can win.

Which turns my tidy explanation exactly inside out. The cheques aren’t evidence that the rivalry is fake. They’re the invoice for it. Google pays twenty billion dollars precisely because Apple could credibly walk — a thirty billion dollar hole is what walking looks like. Google pays Samsung because Bixby and the Galaxy Store were threatening enough that Google’s own internal deck used the word existential. In every case, the size of the cheque measures how dangerous the recipient is.

The uncomfortable part isn’t that the rivalry is theatre. It’s that the rivalry got settled in contracts instead of in products. The competition happened. It was fought, priced, bid on, and resolved — by wire transfer, before anything reached a shop.

The iPhone where Apple built a real search engine, the Galaxy where Bixby got properly developed: those aren’t products that failed. They’re products that were bought out of existence.

Back to the goo

The reason the symbiote stuck with me is that it’s the only word I’ve got that holds both halves of this at once.

On hardware, it’s genuinely mutual. Samsung sells Apple something like 125 million panels a year; Apple gets glass nobody else can make in that volume. Both companies end up better off. Nobody’s being fed on.

On search, it isn’t mutual at all. It’s one thing attached to another where only one of them would be fine alone — Apple would lose a fifth of its profit, and Google would lose its business.

And then the metaphor breaks, in the way that matters most. A symbiote can’t detach. These three can, and do. Google walked away from Samsung’s foundry and Samsung called it a shock. Apple keeps BOE qualified largely so that Samsung and LG have to bid against somebody. These aren’t organisms fused together — they’re contracts, and contracts get cancelled.

Mutual at one layer, parasitic at another, disposable at a third. I never did work out which one I was looking at. I’ve stopped being sure that’s the wrong answer.

One thing to check before you trust any of this

The $20 billion figure is from 2022, and it’s the last one confirmed in open court. Everything since is estimate.

It may also not survive. In September 2025 Judge Mehta’s remedies ruling banned Google’s exclusive default deals but explicitly declined to ban the payments themselves, reasoning that killing them would harm distribution partners. There was no breakup, no forced sale of Chrome. Final judgment landed in December 2025, Google appealed in January 2026, and the Department of Justice cross-appealed in February — specifically asking the D.C. Circuit to vacate the part that let the payments continue.

If the DOJ wins, the single largest arrow in this piece disappears. That won’t be resolved before 2027, possibly later.

Which is its own answer to the question, really. The thing determining who pays whom inside your phone isn’t a product decision, or a partnership, or anything either company will mention on a stage. It’s a court in Washington.

What I checked, and how sure I am

Every claim in this post that could be wrong, with where it came from and how much weight it will take. Three of these didn’t survive checking, and one of them was mine.