Apple and Google both win by killing the native iOS YouTube app, but we all lose

News that Apple will not include a native YouTube app in iOS 6 in favor of a forthcoming standalone app to be built by Google marks another endpoint for the Apple-Google partnership.

The two sides are pulling apart, each new split has different motivations, and both Apple and Google stand to win and lose in different ways. And the specific repercussions of YouTube no longer being bundled in iOS are no different. Google will have a lot more flexibility with a standalone YouTube app. It will be able to update the app much more frequently — and hopefully bring it up to date with the mobile web YouTube experience, which is markedly better than the native app. Perhaps more importantly, Google can now control how it displays lucrative pre-roll advertising in the app. Apple, on the other hand, no longer has to pay whatever license fee may have existed for including YouTube in iOS. What's more, Apple doesn't have to pay its own developers to build an app for a service operated by a direct competitor. Instead, it can assume Google will want to keep YouTube in front of the huge numbers of iOS 6 users and build its own app. Which is exactly what's happening.