Google has been paying Apple billions of dollars to keep its search bar on the iPhone, Bloomberg has reported, citing court documents.
Speculation about how much Google pays Apple to be on the iPhone has been rife for years but the latest revelation claims the search giant paid $1billion in 2014 alone.
Attorneys representing Oracle, which has been fighting Google in an intellectual properly infringement case relating to Android, made the revelation in a US district court.
Oracle attorney Annette Hurst, who disclosed details of the Google-Apple agreement at last week's court hearing, said a Google witness questioned during pretrial information said that "at one point in time the revenue share was 34 percent," Bloomberg reported.
Oracle and Google are locked in a court battle since 2010 with Oracle alleging that the search engine company used its Java software without paying for it to develop Android.
Spokespersons of Apple and Google declined to comment on the information disclosed in court, the agency reported.
However, earlier this week Google had said in a filing the details of the agreement were confidential.
"The specific financial terms of Google's agreement with Apple are highly sensitive to both Google and Apple. Both Apple and Google have alwaystreated this information as extremely confidential," the filing said.
The Oracle attorney claimed Android had generated revenue of about $31 billion and profit of $22 billion since its release, Reuters reporte after reviewing the court documents.
"Assuming Android has only generated material revenue since 2010, then these figures would constitute about 10 percent of Google's revenue and 15 percent of its gross profit since that time," Atlantic Equities analyst James Cordwell told Reuters.
"This makes sense given mobile is probably about 40 percent of Google's revenue today, having ramped up from close to zero over the last 5-6 years, with this split between iOS and Android," Cordwell added.
