Brian Higgins, a 28-year Verizon veteran who was on a team from 2017 to 2023 that struck deals with Google to pick software to preload onto the carrier's phones, testified in a federal court in Washington:"To the best of my knowledge, I believe it is pre-installed all the time."
In the first week of one of the biggest US antitrust trials in decades, James Kolotouros, a Google executive responsible for negotiating the company's agreements with Android device makers and carriers, testified Google pressed Android smartphone makers to have Google as the default search engine and other apps pre-installed on their machines.
In response, Google lawyer John Schmidtlein showed the court data indicating that users happily stick with Google's search engine when pre-installed on their devices but switch away from others they like less.