How do Google get their apps like this approved? Indie developers get rejected all the time for replicating a function that an apple app already does, but google has chrome and others and now maps?
If Apple want to distance themselves from Google, surely they could just not approve any of their apps.
Apple made a decision at some point (seemingly under pressure) to allow not just Chrome, but all "browsers" (a term that I feel needs to be put in quotes, as all of these applications, including Chrome, must use Apple's HTML renderer, and only thereby have control over some aspects of how requests are cached and the surrounding UI).
Yes: that was actually what I was intending to imply; specifically, that Google wasn't blazing trails here nor are they being given special exceptions.
Opera Mini is not a browser but rather a view into a browser in The Cloud. All network connections and JavaScript evaluation happens elsewhere, and the phone displays the resulting image and proxies clicks back to the server. Apple's sticking point has always been code evaluation on the phone, and currently only permits JavaScriptCore to evaluate code retrieved over the network.
Apple's approval rules/guidelines are not set in stone. They change all the time. A couple years ago they were very strict (and non-agreeable to most people), but since they've backpedalled a bit and have been much much leaner about "replicating already-existing functionality" - approving and even promoting calendars, notebooks, ebook-readers, browsers, calculators, mail clients, weather clients, etc.
If Apple want to distance themselves from Google, surely they could just not approve any of their apps.