That is an interesting article. Let's pick it apart a bit shall we? I think it supports my conjecture but I'm only sharing my reasoning here, I don't have any skin in the game (I sold my Google stock a long time ago)
Quote 1: "Apple's decision to ship its own mapping system in the iPhone 5 and iOS 6 was made over a year before the company's agreement to use Google Maps expired, according to two independent sources familiar with the matter."
So per Tichy's comment it sounds like Apple says "Ok, we're going to do our own Maps product our agreement with Google expires in a year." If you think about the prep for the June event, and the release cycle for iOS, that puts the decision somewhere early this year right? They talk about this in June but they are deciding this in like the January/February time frame. So lets be generous and say Google's contract with them expires in sometime in 2013. (over a year but less than two years, from Jan/Feb 2012.) They are going to be shipping a new phone in October, they know it will be longer lived than a year, they need to decide this year. (point in my favor that this is brought on, in part by the renewal question). Is there any data point we can use to find out when exactly the license expires? I'm going to guess its the sometime just after the last day you can purchase an Apple device with iOS 5 and Google maps, or the just before they ship an update to iOS 5 which has Apple maps.
Why ship their own product? Quote 2: "Apple apparently felt that the older Google Maps-powered Maps in iOS were falling behind Android — particularly since they didn't have access to turn-by-turn navigation, which Google has shipped on Android phones for several years."
Don't know if this is The Verge talking or Apple of course, but would you agree that Apple was falling behind here? Do you think they even asked the question "What would it take to get the latest version of Maps?" No?
Quote #3 allegedly Eric Schmidt: ""what were we going to do, force them not to change their mind? It's their call."
So this seems to say that Apple could have gone to Google and re-licensed, Google was ready to respond and Apple chose not to. So this puts the decision completely in Apple's court right? Google is available, they have what Apple wants, and Apple decides not to go there.
Quote 4: "Interestingly, Apple either didn't know or didn't expect that consumers would find its new maps to be deficient — when iOS software VP Scott Forstall introduced the new mapping system in June, he called it "beautiful" and "gorgeous" and stressed that "we're doing all the cartography ourselves." The company was forced to adopt a different tone last week as complaints about the maps spread, saying the "new map service is a major initiative and we are just getting started with it." The company also promised "continuously improving" maps, and said that "the more people use it, the better it will get." "
I get that Steve is dead, but 99.99% of the people who ship product are still alive and at Apple. Does anyone believe that Apple really believed this product was competitive? Even slightly? Do you? I get that Scott has to say "It's beeeutiful" at the launch, he doesn't get to write the copy, but who dropped the ball here? Apple CorpCom? Scott? All of QA? Engineering? And when was that ball dropped?
Tech companies don't like paying 'product taxes' (what they call licensing fees to third parties on a per-unit basis), none of them do. But shipping crap isn't the answer and never has been. We talk about execution sometimes, that is the process by which a product is made and launched or a company is run, its how executives get measured. And Apple has been a gold standard here for years. And yet this product launch is about as notable as Roger Federer losing the final set in Wimbledon by double faulting every server for 6 games in a row. There are probably a half dozen different ways Apple could have transitioned to their own maps platform which would have resulted in their users seeing nothing but an improving map experience. That Apple was unable to pull that off in this context is unexplained.
So I don't think I was wrong, and I think The Verge has just proved that. If The Verge is accurate than by now Apple would have less, possibly much less, than a year left on their Maps contract with Google. Since they wouldn't ship without that resolved (otherwise they stop shipping product suddenly, that would be bad for them), the time frame is too short to wait for another iOS release, or the next iPhone refresh, Apple chose not to renew and shipped crap. That is all I've ever said about it.
You can claim, as Tichy does, that they just decided to 'kick Google off' and drop their user experience into the toilet and make themselves the butt of many jokes. There is no evidence to suggest (yet) that Google wasn't willing to re-license their use, which would have avoided that fate.
I don't believe they are so incompetent that they would have willfully shipped that maps product when they had an alternative. As Tichy said even Nokia or Bing would have been better, although given the history with Google I expect that the engineering effort would be minimal staying there.
Its an interesting thing to watch this sort of stuff. I've experienced it from the inside at Sun and at NetApp dealing with CIFS, from the outside a Microsoft/Novell networking customer, and now on my iPad with Apple/Google. The basic structure of these things doesn't change all that much.