Qualcomm put out a press release yesterday that runs to about two sentences. The company announced the renewal of its global patent license agreement with Apple, effective April 1, 2027, and the only quote in it came from licensing chief John Han, who said the company was pleased to extend the Apple license agreement. That’s the whole announcement.
The terms weren’t disclosed, and neither was the length of the new deal. Financial details were left out entirely and the announcement never says how long the renewed licence runs.
Patents And Chips Are Two Separate Deals
This is where people get confused, and it’s worth separating out. Apple pays Qualcomm two different ways: once for the modem chips it buys, and once for the patents behind the technology inside them. The supply deal that had Qualcomm shipping 5G modems to Apple has not been renewed and runs out at the end of this year, which is exactly what Apple wanted as it moves to its own silicon. The patent licence is the other one, and that’s the one that just got extended.
So the modems are going away. The royalties are not.
Apple Has Been Building Its Own Modem For Years
The C1, which shipped in the iPhone 16e, was Apple’s first in-house cellular modem and a genuine step away from Qualcomm hardware. Progress since then has been steady rather than dramatic, partly because the C1 still doesn’t support mmWave 5G, an area where Qualcomm is well ahead.
But even a perfect Apple modem wouldn’t end the payments. Qualcomm holds standard essential patents on 5G itself, so anyone building a phone that connects to a 5G network is using that work whether the chip says Qualcomm on it or not. Designing your own silicon gets you out of the purchase order. It doesn’t get you out of the licence.
How The Two Companies Got Here
Worth remembering how bad this relationship once was. Apple sued Qualcomm in 2017, three days after the FTC filed its own case alleging anticompetitive licensing, with the complaint pointing at billions in rebates offered to Apple in exchange for using Qualcomm modems exclusively. Qualcomm countersued a few months later.
All of it ended in 2019 when both sides dropped their litigation worldwide, Apple made an undisclosed payment, and the two signed a six-year patent licence with an option to extend by two more years. Apple took that option, which pushed the expiry to March 2027. The new agreement picks up the day after.
For Qualcomm, that means royalty income from every iPhone sold continues past the point it stops selling Apple anything at all.
