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Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

Google may very well want more control over its YouTube app, including the ability to update it at will (normal AppStore processing aside), and Apple may be pleased to relinquish responsibility.

The YouTube app seemed necessary to jumpstarting iOS interest in users way back when ... which is way back when now, and the need for bundling is past.

Not war. Maturity.

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Apple gave a statement to The Verge, which basically says their licence from Google expired: "our license to include the YouTube app in iOS has ended".

I know Google are hiring iOS software engineers for YouTube right now in London, so I'm sure there will be some official native offering appearing in the future.

Of course one would imagine that the date of expiration was known at the time they announced iOS 6 with YouTube in it.

When did they announce that?

iOS 6 was announced at WWDC on 11 June this year.

They never mentioned YouTube on stage though, it just wasn't yet removed from the developer previews. That's like saying Apple advertised Mountain Lion as having the 32-bit kernel because it was present in DP1.

I have little doubt they were planning to remove it the entire time and it just wasn't a high priority issue until the license expired in between beta 3 and beta 4.

I'm guessing that either they were in negotiations for a potential renewal / extension to the license or (far more likely) they didn't want headlines about their feud with Google taking attention away from the product announcement.

Or more likely, "we chose not to renew our license".

Yeah. I always hated the built-in YouTube app. Being made by Apple, it was infrequently updated (only with iOS version changes), and it didn't let you do everything the mobile site did. It's good to see Google are finally in control.

Here's an even better explanation http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/08/06/why-is-apple-ditching...

I got my first iOS device only 2 months ago and didn't really get why there was a YouTube app. Seemed like a generic corporate tie up.

> [I] didn't really get why there was a YouTube app

Because back in 2007 there was no such thin as "HTML5 video", and youtube was already the most popular video site by a pretty long shot. So they built that one in via a dedicated application.

Back in 2007 there wasn't even an App Store. There would have been no way to watch YouTube videos on the iPhone at all without it.

Hardly, it's just that in 2007 YouTube and online video were basically synonymous. You didn't really have one without the other.

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