Video service will no longer be a pre-loaded app on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
The newest version of iOS 6 will no longer include the YouTube app.
The video service has been a fixture on iOS home screens since the original iPhone, but now Apple have decided to leave the Google video service out of the next iteration of it's mobile operating system.
The company's official statement reads: "Our licence to include the YouTube app in iOS has ended, customers can use YouTube in the Safari browser and Google is working on a new YOuTube app to be on the App Store."
Short and to the point.
This marks the latest in a series of moves by Apple to distance themselves from Google.
As MG Siegler points out on TechCrunch, when the iPhone launched in 2007, there were three key elements of the device that relied on Google: Maps, YouTube and search.
Now, just one of those is left standing, so how long before Apple set another search client as default? Imagine a world in which Bing was made the default option on iOS devices. How many people would bother to change it?
Bearing in mind that Google owns Android, is this just the latest battle in the war between Apple and Android?
Nonetheless, it may well be beneficial to Google that Apple has dropped the YouTube app. The iOS version hasn't received any significant updates for some time, while Google has made huge improvements to YouTube on other devices and on the mobile web.
Furthermore, Google was not able to monetize the Apple YouTube app views, but obviously that won't be a problem with their own.
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