Sorry. You missed the point. Google wants as many people to use youtube & search. It makes money via ads on both. Having it as default is good (google pays mone

Sorry. You missed the point. Google wants as many people to use youtube & search. It makes money via ads on both. Having it as default is good (google pays money to FF to be default for example) and even if it is not the default, people can use google by typing google.com in safari. From there, the experience is identical. Similarly for youtube, google wants the widest audience. Wider the audience, more the ads and more money. If apple switches from google to bing for safari default, apple gets to spite google a bit and google may lose quite a bit of traffic. This hurts Google. Google will never want to block iOS users from search or youtube. Secondly, neither is a competitive advantage in smartphone markets. No one is going to switch platforms for either search or youtube. Maps on the other hand, does not have much advertising. The previous app did not have any advertising at all. They got location data from it but they can get that from android phones. Google loses nothing if they don't release an app. If they don't release an app, it is a great advantage for android. So they have a tradeoff to make, whether to maintain that competitive advantage or release a maps app and gain some audience. If I were google, I wouldn't release maps. For the first time ever, android is way way ahead of iOS in one of the core features.