Apple might not be going “thermonuclear” on Google just yet, but it’s not quite ready to buddy up with the Mountain View giant just yet either. At WWDC yesterday it took the opportunity to make its iOS and OS X devices a little less reliant on Google’s infrastructure by embracing search rival Bing, in a move that could one day pose a serious threat to Google’s search revenues.

The iPhone maker has announced a pact with Microsoft to make Bing the default search provider for the Spotlight feature in its OS X operating system. Currently, Spotlight is used to search Apple Mac’s hard drives for documents, files, photos, that kind of thing. But Spotlight can also trigger web searches, which will now be powered by Bing.

We should note that Spotlight isn’t nearly as capable of Google Search. And Apple knows it can’t dump Google just yet – the two companies still have a pre-existing deal that makes Google the default search engine in Safari, and Google searches are still integrated into its new iOS 8 update. But what Spotlight can do is catch users off-guard, pre-empting them with search options even before they open up the Safari browser, said Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research, in an interview with CNet.

Fanbois will note that Bing was already powering search results for Apple’s Siri, and this latest move is a reminder that Apple wants to wind down its reliance on Google wherever it can. Google will likely remain visible on Apple’s products in the short-to-medium term, but in other areas Apple is offering alternatives – it powers its own searches through iTunes, the App Store, Apple Maps, iBooks etc., and now Bing is powering Spotlight. At the same time as this announcement, Apple also said it’s going to add DuckDuckGo to Safari as an option for private searches.

Will Apple one day drop Google as the default search engine on its devices? We can’t say for sure but Apple does seem to be heading in that direction. If it did it could cause a major dent in Google’s mobile search revenues. Even though Android is the most dominant smartphone platform in the US, iOS smartphones generate 53.1 percent of all mobile web traffic in North America, compared to just 44.5 percent on Android. From those stats, one can assume that iOS also claims the lion’s share of mobile search queries – traffic that Google stands to lose if Apple ever decides to stick the knife in.

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