Apple’s operating systems iOS 7 for mobile and Mac OS X Mavericks for laptops and desktops, which were introduced to developers last week, allow users from Russia, some other countries of the former Soviet Union, and Turkey, to choose Yandex as the default search engine.
The news was confirmed by the Russian company’s International Media Relations Representative Vladimir Isaev in an exchange with East-West Digital News. Both operating systems will be released to the public this fall; however, developers registered with Apple can already download them to have a first look.
In September 2012, Russian Internet giant Yandex first partnered with Apple to power geo-search in the latter’s Maps application on iOS 6. Another one of Yandex’s tap into apps for iOS did not go so well, however: in January 2013, the company launched a US-only social recommendation app called Wonder, which was blocked by Facebook, its main data source, shortly after it was introduced.
Yandex may have paid Apple “between several million and several tens of millions of dollars” to be included in the list of search engines in Safari, according to sources quoted by the Russian newspaper Kommersant and Russia Beyond The Headlines.
“It depends on a number of parameters: whether the price is fixed or tied to the number of search queries, how long the agreement is for, etcetera” one source said.
For example, it was revealed in February that Google would pay Apple $1 billion in 2014 to maintain its status as the default search engine in iOS. In contrast, in 2009 Google paid just $82 million for the same right, Russia Beyond The Headlines reminded.
