If you read the site often then you’ll probably already know that Microsoft have been making quite a bit of money from Android. Various amounts have been mentioned over the years, but now we have some concrete figures – from Samsung at least. Samsung alone was giving Microsoft $1 billion in licensing payments in 2012, which let’s be fair, is a massive amount of money.
It’s all due to patents held by Microsoft which Samsung has to pay to use. In 2012 Samsung paid $1 billion, which is £626 million. The agreement, however, was cut short after Samsung decided to stop paying following the Microsoft purchase of Nokia. Samsung state that the deal was a cross-licensing agreement which also let Microsoft use Samsung technologies.
Microsoft are taking legal action to try and settle this but, despite the big numbers, it’ll probably end up getting renegotiated later down the line.