Apple is testing code to track Google’s pushy Chrome prompts inside Safari

Beta builds of iOS 27.2 contain code that keeps track of Google’s Chrome promotions inside Safari, according to 9to5Mac. If you’ve ever searched for something on an iPhone and had Google cover half the page with a banner about switching to Chrome or the Google app, that’s the thing Apple appears to be logging.

From what’s been found so far, Safari looks for those banners on Google search pages and records what happens next. It notes whether the banner was shown, whether you seem to be signed in to a Google account, and whether you tapped it, closed it, or just ignored it.

Apple doesn’t seem to be stopping the banners from appearing, at least not in this code. It’s only watching them.

Of course, these annoying pushes to grab up potential users isn’t something new. Windows has been nudging people toward Edge for years, and we’ve written about that more than once. On the iPhone things aren’t that bad, but that’s mostly because Safari is the default and Google has to work harder to pull people away from it.

We’d guess the reason for the tracking is legal and not really about annoyed users. Regulators in the EU and the UK are looking at browser competition, and the Digital Markets Act is a big part of that. Google has told UK regulators that it competes strongly with Safari on iOS, and it has pointed to its Chrome promotions as proof.

If Apple has its own numbers on how often the banners appear and how people react to them, it can check Google’s claim against real data. That makes more sense to us than Apple suddenly caring about pop-ups.

It’s worth noting that there’s no guarantee this will make it to the final iOS 27.2 release. The company might remove the code, change it, or even postpone the release to a later date.

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