Good find. I believe that the “new channel” restored it to something like what it looked like in 2015, if I understand the descriptions correctly.

>For some reason

When you're talking about Google products, fragmentation comes built-in as expected. There is no reason for 3 versions of maps to exist within Google ecosystem but I don't think they really care

And conversely Google Earth Pro can view street view imagery, too, but only the current version – historic street view is only available via Google Maps through the browser.

Some of this may be Google shipping its executive incentives (as in “Don’t ship the org chart”).

Another example: Google Street View is available on the web - unless you use an iPhone and enter the address directly on maps.google.com instead of google.com. On the maps hostname with an iPhone, clicking the Street View preview just shows a nag screen that it’s only available in the Google Maps app. That’s not true, so I assume that app installs is some group’s KPI.