Apple has been touting that services will be a huge area of growth for the company, as sales of its hardware start to peak | Photo Credit: IANS

San Francisco: Google is reportedly paying Apple a whopping $9 billion in 2018 to remain the default search engine for iPhone's Safari browser on iOS, the media reported. According to Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall (via Business Insider), this number would only continue to grow, potentially leading to a payment of $12 billion in 2019, 9to5Mac reported late on Saturday. While Apple uses Google as the default search engine in Safari on iOS, the company also uses Bing in various other places such as searching the web via Siri.

Apple has been touting that services will be a huge area of growth for the company, as sales of its hardware start to peak. Apple Music has seen steady growth since its inception back in 2015. While the free iCloud storage tier still remains at just 5GB, more users are now willing to pay the monthly fee to get access to more storage.

