For most users it's built off of Safari. My understanding is that Orion essentially exists, because Apple restricts search providers on Safari. Most people use it on iOS for that reason, because when you use Kagi on iOS, you cannot use the search engine as a search provider and have to install the Kagi extension, but safari is still probably leaking your searches to whatever search provider you selected (Google, Duckduckgo, etc.). However, no alternate browser engine is allowed on iOS so safari is all you get.
I'm sure Apple's excuse is that they don't want bad actors changing the search provider to some spyware search engine and I'm sure that's true, but for your average Kagi user, it feels like that it what Google's getting by paying Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine. It's hard to use a search engine other than the 5 that Apple approved.
I'm sure Apple's excuse is that they don't want bad actors changing the search provider to some spyware search engine and I'm sure that's true, but for your average Kagi user, it feels like that it what Google's getting by paying Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine. It's hard to use a search engine other than the 5 that Apple approved.