SAN DIEGO — Apple spent six years building its own cellular modem to reduce its dependence on Qualcomm. On Wednesday, it renewed the licensing agreement that proves the job is not finished.
The clarification is structural. Qualcomm Technology Licensing, which generated $1.3 billion in revenue last quarter, collects royalties on the wireless standards themselves, not on Qualcomm chips. Apple’s C1 and C2 modems displaced Qualcomm hardware from most of the iPhone lineup, but every phone that uses a cellular network, regardless of whose modem is inside, remains subject to Qualcomm’s claims on 5G standards-essential patents. Building your own modem reduces the chip bill. It does not reduce the patent bill.
Qualcomm announced the renewal Wednesday, effective April 1, 2027, when the current arrangement expires. Financial terms and the duration of the new agreement were not disclosed. The previous deal, a six-year license with a built-in two-year extension first signed as part of the 2019 settlement that ended years of litigation, was extended by Apple in 2024, pushing the expiration to March 31, 2027. Wednesday’s renewal picks up the day after that date.
Qualcomm Technology Licensing Executive Vice President John Han said the company was “pleased to extend the Apple license agreement.” That the announcement came with no financial disclosure is consistent with how these agreements work: the precise royalty rate per device has never been made public in any of the prior filings.
What shifted in the seven years since the original 2019 settlement is that Apple actually built the alternative it threatened Qualcomm with. The C1 modem shipped in the iPhone 16e last year, the first production Apple device to run on Apple-designed cellular silicon. The C2 followed in the iPhone 18 Pro series, now deployed globally, with one notable exception: in the United States, the iPhone 18 Pro Max still ships with a Qualcomm modem. Apple has not explained publicly what specific technical requirement keeps Qualcomm hardware in that model.
The gap points at the limits of Apple’s modem ambition. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon modems are optimized for millimeter-wave 5G, the short-range high-bandwidth variant that US carriers deploy for dense urban coverage. Apple’s C2 supports mmWave in its specifications, but carrier-specific certification requirements in the US market appear to make the transition more complicated than in other markets where 5G deployments rely on sub-6GHz bands. Whether that explanation holds or whether the US holdout reflects ongoing manufacturing or software issues with the C2 is something Apple has not addressed.
The 2019 settlement remains the reference point for this entire dynamic. Apple and Qualcomm reached it after legal proceedings in the United States, Germany, and China, in which Apple had accused Qualcomm of anticompetitive licensing practices and Qualcomm had sued for patent infringement across Apple’s entire product line. The settlement’s terms were sealed, but Qualcomm’s stock rose more than 25 percent on the day it was announced. Both sides described it as a resolution; what it actually produced was a renewable commercial relationship now in its third iteration.
According to Qualcomm’s official announcement, the new agreement is effective April 1, 2027. Financial analysts at Seeking Alpha noted the renewal secures QTL revenue from Apple at a time when chip-supply revenue from Apple is declining, providing a floor for the licensing division regardless of how quickly Apple completes the modem transition.
Neither company disclosed a new royalty rate, how long the new agreement runs, or what conditions, if any, either side attached. The thing neither disclosed is also the thing that matters most: whether this is a continuation of the 2019 settlement terms or the beginning of a renegotiation.
