In addition to powering iOS’s Weather and Stocks apps, Yahoo is reportedly in talks with Apple to play a more prominent role in the Cupertino company’s ecosystem. According to theWall Street Journal, the two companies are discussing “new arrangements, including possible deals to get more content from Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News” and other properties. Apple-style BlinkFeed?
Talks are preliminary at the moment, meaning no deal is imminent. Yahoo also provides data for Siri, and could look to further integrate its data into Apple’s virtual assistant. The Internet company is allegedly drawing up plans to entice Apple to make use of Yahoo’s Web-search results—through both Safari on the desktop and iOS—but current partnerships would make that deal difficult. Right now, Microsoft’s Bing powers Yahoo Search, while Google still remains the default engine on iOS.
Yahoo’s motives are apparently to grow the company’s mobile presence, and a deeper partnership with Apple could certainly achieve that. The window of opportunity to rely less on Google seems to be opening for Apple, but whether the company will capitalize remains to be seen. Sources claim Apple has stated that it isn’t willing to ditch Google if that means a worsened search experience, so it seems Yahoo will certainly have some convincing to do.
[Source: TechnoBuffalo]