Apple's revenue last fiscal year was $391 billion dollars; I think they'll be okay without Google's $18 billion.
It's way more critical for Mozilla—Google's payment is what pays for Firefox.
Right now, if an Apple executive asks, "How does Apple make money working on Safari?" the answer is really clear: "Google pays us $18 billion annually."
After that money is cut off, an executive at Apple has to ask the question: "Why should we keep investing in Safari, instead of SwiftUI and Xcode?"
I'm sure we'd all love the answer to be, "We have plenty of money, so we should invest heavily in both," but that's not really how the world works, and certainly not how Apple works. Executives make hard choices about what to prioritize. This will be one of them.
I don't think you should listen to anyone's ideas about why Apple does what it does. But if you want to hear my unfounded speculation: Apple wants to control the out-of-the-box experience for its shiny hardware and therefore includes a variety of apps that >x% of the customers are presumed to use on the first day they have their new shiny hardware, where x is some number and "day" may mean "week" or… well, really, this is unfounded speculation, it doesn't have to be precise.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Apple works. Nobody is debating whether they should keep working on Xcode or Safari; it’s both.
WebKit is one of the most important frameworks Apple makes; many of their own apps rely on it like Mail and the App Store.
And many thousands of 3rd party apps (Facebook, Twitter) rely on WebKit to render web content on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS and tvOS.
Does losing $18 billion mean some adjustments? Of course, but it’s probably something else that’s not mission critical, not something like Safari/WebKit that’s on over 2 billion devices.
Facebook, Twitter etc have no choice but to use what iOS provides.
It's not like they'd stop publishing iOS apps I'd apple decided to never update the WebView componemt again.
And the audience is captive, if they get a bad rendering in mail they won't think "bad apple" but "bad email sender", same way we all bend around Outlook's rendering.
It doesn’t need to make money. A good web browser is a standard part of an operating system these days. Apple can’t ship without one. You might as well ask how they monetise Finder or Notes.
Strategically it makes no sense to not own something that important.
Remember: Safari was created when Apple’s 5-year deal with Microsoft that made Internet Explorer the default browser for MacOS X expired in 2003.
10 years later. Google forked WebKit to create Chrome.
If we're going to split hairs over the whole "Blink is an inferior WebKit fork" brouhaha, we shouldn't forget who Apple sherlocked to get there. After all, turnabout is fair play.
[0] https://blogs.kde.org/2005/04/29/bitter-failure-named-safari...
Similarly, Safari isn't clouds and rainbows either. It serves the same purpose IE did back in the day; furnish a "premium" experience that is deliberately irreplaceable and intertwined with the OS. We saw this with the push notification API, "Add to Homescreen" functionality and so many other places where Apple dragged their feet and refused a featureset that would enable competition with native apps. This is a hell of their own making, Apple can leave any time they want by acquiescing to app publishers the same way they did on Mac.
Safari has long lagged on other browsers, Apple would rather it didn't exist but have to keep it ticking over
With less competition they will likely be happy to lag behind even further again
If you check the Interop 2025 numbers, you’ll see Safari is neck and neck with the other browsers and has implemented the latest CSS features [1].
The WebKit team was first to crack the code on how to implement :has() that eluded browser teams for 20 years and was the first to ship it [2].
As for wishing that they didn’t have to maintain Safari, it’s a mission critical framework on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS… it’s the only thing saving the web from the monoculture of Chrome-based browsers; unfortunately Firefox is in the low single-digits as far as market share goes. Safari on iOS has about 25% market share.
Apart from not implementing a handful of Google’s sneaky draft fingerprinting proposals (WebUSB, WebMIDI, etc), what is Safari actually lagging on?
Developers, who wanted a real, native SDK, were greatly disappointed (to put it mildly), and in 2008 Apple introduced not only a native iPhone app SDK with developer tooling but an entire app store.
But Jobs wasn't entirely off base. Gmail had replaced dedicated email apps. Apple had implemented native-like widgets in Mobile Safari as well as touch input, javascript canvas support, and audio support. Today you can implement a video streaming client (Netflix), game streaming client (Amazon Luna), groupware client (Discord, Slack, Teams), or even a whole office suite (Office 365) in Safari. Even many "native" mobile apps are basically just shells on web apps.
Or it could all go to shit. Hard to say.
I wonder, though, about Firefox and a post-divestiture Chrome. Browsers are labor-intensive to develop due to their complexity, and the Web keeps changing. Moreover, people expect browsers to be free of charge; it’s been a long time since the days when people paid for Netscape Navigator and Opera. Without outright subsidizing development, Web browsers need to be either community-supported, ad-funded, or subscription-based in order to fund development.
Revenue != profit. $18 billion for something they have to maintain anyway is 100% profit.
TODO: find a link to the original article that mentioned it.
As a percentage of profit, the $20 billion was 17.5% of Apple’s operating profit in 2022.
I don’t think that has any material impact on something as established and as important as Safari.
This loss of funding will be good for them, they can focus on a browser instead of stupid things.