Apple warns millions of iPhone users: stop using Google Chrome

Updated on 7/18 to address Apple’s criticism of Chrome in the new Webkit release.

We all know relationships can be complicated, but few are as complicated as the one between Apple and Google. Just look at Apple’s creepy new attack ad on Google, with a clear message for its 1.4 billion users: stop using Chrome on your iPhone.

So why now? Google is on a mission to convert Safari users to Chrome. It currently relies on Safari to drive most searches from iPhones, made possible by a financial agreement between itself and Apple that makes Google search the default on Safari. But that agreement could soon be challenged by monopoly investigations in the U.S. and Europe. And so Google pursues Plan B.

Chrome only has a 30% install base among iPhone users. Google’s goal is to increase that to 50%, bringing another 300 million iPhone users into its data tent. Apple, of course, wants to avoid that. Those 300 million pairs of eyes generate serious online revenue, and as search changes with the introduction of on-device AI, it’s going to be a battleground between retention and conversion.

That’s why you may have seen Apple’s Safari privacy billboards popping up around your city. What started as a local campaign in San Francisco has now gone global. And while the ads don’t mention Chrome, they don’t need to. Nothing else matters. Safari and Chrome together have a market share of over 90% on mobile devices. And on the iPhone, it’s a straight-up shootout between the two.

Privacy is Chrome’s Achilles heel. Tracking cookies persist, and plans to phase them out have already been delayed as Google navigates an ongoing regulatory minefield. Chrome’s quasi-privacy mode is far less private than users thought. And in recent days, we’ve seen warnings that Google is recording Chrome users’ device data with a hidden setting that can’t be turned off.

Apple just upped the ante in this privacy war with a new video ad that applies Hitchcock’s “The Birds” to smartphone privacy. It’s powerful and memorable, and the message is clear. If you don’t want to be watched online, use Safari. Which means — very, very simply — if you don’t want to be watched online, don’t use Google Chrome. I’ve reached out to Google for comment on the new ad.

When The Birds came out in the 1960s, it was shocking and scary and thought provoking. The message was that there is a threat that we don’t really see, but it’s everywhere. As one character in the film says, “Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? I think you’re the cause of all this. I think you’re evil.”

While there are suggestions in the video that this is targeting Android users to bring them over to the iPhone, that’s not the point. No user is going to ditch Android to access another browser, no matter how snappy the ad is. This is about keeping iPhone users within Apple’s walled garden. But even then, it might not be that simple.

The harsh reality for Apple is that its users prefer Google Search. And Apple itself has reportedly found it to be better than the alternatives. Echoes here of Apple dropping Google Maps a few years ago and then having to make a U-turn. We can assume that even if Google is removed as the default search engine on Safari, users will be able to set it manually.

The question then is whether Google will offer advanced AI search features on Chrome that aren’t available elsewhere. We know such moves have been considered but rejected for now, but such AI browser integrations are still in their infancy. And on that note, Apple has other critical anti-Chrome messaging coming into play.

In addition to the Birds-inspired videos and social media ads, Apple also released an update to “Private Browsing 2.0” to highlight recent innovations that improve security and privacy for Safari users. “We’ve made tremendous advancements in web privacy,” Apple says, “and hope to set a new industry standard for what Private Browsing should be.”

This didn’t get much attention upon release due to the powerful nature of the video, but it’s now being picked up on social media and has very significant implications with its “major impact” on Google Chrome, as a post on X describes it.

This is a huge deal in the increasingly heated Chrome vs. Safari browser war, and it goes beyond the iPhone. Google is pushing its Topics API to break the current cookie deprecation impasse. It won’t be allowed by regulators to simply kill tracking cookies, given the damage to the marketing industry without an alternative.

The Topics API aims to provide that alternative, striking a balance between stopping cross-site individual fingerprinting and targeted marketing, where users are grouped into like-minded but anonymous groups presented to advertisers.

But as Apple points out: “Imagine what advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence can infer about you based on different combinations of interest signals. What patterns will emerge if data brokers and trackers can compare and contrast large swaths of the population? Remember, they can combine the output from the Topics API with whatever other data points they have available, and it’s the analysis of it all together that feeds the algorithms that try to draw conclusions about you.”

What Apple is saying, simply put, is that fingerprinting and cross-site tracking are here to stay. And that no amount of half-measures within Chrome can match the purist approach to privacy it claims for itself. Google is caught between the current tracking cookies we all love and a new set of technologies that have so far failed to catch on. Apple is trying to undermine its Privacy Sandbox before it’s even fully released.

The browser wars are just getting started, and Apple has some serious weapons in play to attack Chrome before the changes are implemented. But while those 300 million Safari users may stay off Apple’s hands for now, you’ll want to watch this space…