New iPhone won’t have YouTube pre-loaded, Apple says

In another mark of Apple's continued rivalry with Google, the company announced Monday that it would be dropping the pre-loaded YouTube app from its new iOS 6 operating system, which will be coming with the new iPhone 5.

While the current iOS operating on iPhones and iPads includes a pre-loaded app for the popular video site, it will no longer be freely directing its users to a company owned by its biggest competitor in the smartphone OS market.

"Apple and Google are the mobile operating systems for the future and this is where the battleground is going to lie," said Needham & Co analyst Kerry Rice in a Reuters story.

According to CNET, it's unclear whether the move is a deliberate one to discourage the use of Google products on its devices, or if both Google and Apple decided at the end of the former's license that a YouTube app is no longer valuable to iPhone users.

YouTube, which was purchased by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, will still be accessible via the Safari browser. Google is also in the process of developing its own YouTube app, which will eventually be available in the Apple App store. Until now, Apple has developed the YouTube app on its own. A test version of the new iOS 6, which was released on August 7, showed that would no longer be the case.

Analyst Ronald Josey from ThinkEquity suggests that the move could indicate Apple might not be as keen to keep Google as its default search engine, either.

"The writing's on the wall that when search is up for renewal, there's a significant chance that Google may not be the default," Josey said to Reuters.

Reactions from Apple fans and industry professionals have been mixed. Some iPhone users are calling the drop "the last straw," saying it will prompt them to switch from the iPhone to an Android-based device.

The announcement about YouTube wasn't all business for Apple, though. Apple released its iOS 6 beta changelog on August 6, detailing all the changes that would be coming to the new iOS, including an item about embedded YouTube URLs no longer working. It included an example of the kind of link that will no longer function — and in a rare show of humour, Apple directed developers to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up."

If Apple is still Rickrolling people years after the rest of us stopped, maybe it really is time they acknowledge they just aren't at the top of their game when it comes to online videos.