Apple Inc and Google Inc’s Motorola Mobility unit have agreed to settle all patent litigation between them over smartphones, ending one of the highest-profile lawsuits in technology.
In a joint statement, the companies said they would work together in “some areas of patent reform”.
But the deal did not include licensing their technology to each other.
Apple , which produces iPhones, and firms that make phones using Google’s Android software earlier filed dozens of lawsuits against one another. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs called Android a “stolen product.”
Earlier this month, a jury in California ordered South Korea’s Samsung firm to pay Apple $119.6m (£71m) for infringing two of its patents.
The court also ruled that Apple infringed Samsung’s patents and awarded $158,000 in damages.
Apple has battled Google and what once were the largest adopters of its Android mobile software, partly to try to curb the rapid expansion of the free, rival operating system.
But it has been unable to slow Android’s ascendancy, which is now installed on an estimated 80 percent of new phones sold every year. Motorola, the U.S. company that pioneered the mobile phone, no longer ranks among the biggest smartphone makers.
Source: BBC
