How is going from having your app presinstalled on every device and being maintained, for free, by Apple developers to having to write and maintain your own app and put it in the app store a "win"??
There is no win here for Google! Less users (not everyone is going to install it), less data coming in, more money spent, having to hire more dedicated iOS coders inhouse at Google...
I think you're missing some of the major pros for Google...
With this new app, they control all of the branding, all of the upstream data gathering, and paid ads.
It may be a win in a similar way that the Chrome browser was a win. Google kicked browser competition into high gear in terms of performance and ACID compliance when they launched Chrome. Apple Maps may have had a similar effect. I hate to use "killer app" but a great GPS makes the phone a more valuable device.
I still have a standalone GPS in the car which we will definitely not need once we all upgrade to phones with turn-by-turn directions. I have relatives that pride themselves in not needing smartphones, but seeing turn-by-turn was very compelling.
My question which I haven't seen a definitive answer on is if Google had the ability pre-iOS 6 to do turn-by-turn? They already had it on Android. Were they slow on iOS, or were key APIs missing?
[Did] Google [have] the ability pre-iOS 6 to do turn-by-turn?
The original Maps app was written by Apple and consumed data licensed from (and presumably hosted by?) Google. Apple wanted turn-by-turn on iOS, but the data required was not part of their original deal with Google. Google was willing to license it, provided that Apple give Google additional data: presumably anonymized data about where users were for Google to use to provide better AI. Although it's quite possible Google wanted better hooks to serve ads as well. They couldn't reach a deal, so Apple went their own way.
Apple and Google were certainly technically capable of building Google-backed turn-by-turn into iOS 6, if not much earlier.
Wow, I had forgotten in all of this that the original app was written by Apple. So going back to the original comment of being a "win for Apple"- this does seem to have been an end-around past the licensing issue, but not much of a "win" for Apple. Google gets kicked out of the default app and launches a third-part app in probably the best possible way for them though.
