Your line of reasoning follows from the assumption that Apple dropped Google, and not vice versa. It's entirely possible that Google declined to renew their lic

Your line of reasoning follows from the assumption that Apple dropped Google, and not vice versa. It's entirely possible that Google declined to renew their licensing agreement with Apple after the initial X years were up. Google had Apple by the balls and decided to squeeze, for lack of a better analogy. Ultimately, moving away from Google data was a given - it would be a strategic mistake to have a competitor control one of the key elements of your platform. It appears that for one reason or another, this changeover occured too early. I'm also curious why Apple didn't source more of their data from OSM. In my experience and use cases, the data there is significantly more detailed than Google's (YMMV).