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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.

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

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.

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