Elijah Ketchum
As many of you know already, Apple has just announced that they would not include their 1st-party YouTube app in the next iteration of iOS. Plenty of sites have taken this opportunity to show the fact that Apple and Google are opposing forces, and with that comes a dissociation of products and services. However, this can actually be a very good thing for Apple, Google, and all iOS users.
Up until the release of Google’s new version of Google+ for iOS, almost every single app Google put into the App Store sucked. For instance, Gmail. But after we got a glimpse of Google’s beautiful work on the new Google+ app, many became believers. If Apple had announced their dropping of the YouTube app before we saw Google+ for iOS’s makeover this reaction would have been a completely different story, but because of Google’s latest efforts, I am a believer.
Apple’s move to drop their 1st-party YouTube app leaves Google in a position with two possible outcomes: develop a YouTube app for iOS or let iOS users deal with the mobile site. Now that Google has decided they would like to make quality apps for iOS, it doesn’t worry me that they will have to develop their own app, and leads me to believe that they will. And this will be a good thing for iOS users, because the YouTube app Apple was supplying was pretty bare. You could watch videos and leave comments, and that’s about as far as it went. Sure, there were a few other features, but it was nowhere near as robust and Google’s YouTube app for Android. This means that if Google follows their recent iOS app development patterns (and I mean very recent), the iOS community should be anxiously awaiting a beautifully developed YouTube app.
Google hasn’t actually said they will develop an iOS app yet though, and if they don’t many iOS users will be hurting for a native app. But Google knows how big YouTube is, and even if they were so blind as to say a native app isn’t necessary, the community will make sure El Goog knows its mistake. This also will relieve the duty of developing a third-party app for a service they don’t actually own, much like they’ve done with Google Maps. Now all we can do is wait to see if Google can bring us the YouTube app that we want to see, and if they do, the world of iOS will be ready to finally get a proper YouTube experience.
