Google launches official YouTube app for iPhone

Apple iPhone users love watching YouTube videos. According to Nielsen, as recently as June, it was the third most used app, including pre-installed apps and downloadable ones. The YouTube client has been on the phone since its launch in 2007 and was one of the original features that was the center of early iPhone advertisements. But as we told you recently, iOS 6 will not have a YouTube client and while that could be the continuation of Apple's de-Googling of its smartphone (Google Maps is being replaced with Apple's own mapping app), the Mountain View search giant said it was working on a better version of the app for the App Store. Apple blamed an expiring license for this decision to remove the app from iOS 6. As far as the Apple iPad is concerned, Google said it is working on a new YouTube app for the tablet as well.

Google has said that over 1 billion of YouTube's daily video views occur on a mobile device with 4 billion video streamed daily. It was the Apple iPhone that started all this with its launch in 2007 and after that, a YouTube connection turned out to be a feature that mobile phone owners were demanding. Featurephone users started connecting to YouTube's mobile site while some smartphones, like the Windows Mobile flavored HTC Touch Diamond and HTC Touch Pro had their own YouTube clients. With Google the owner of the site, it obviously made sense to include a YouTube client on Google's open source Android OS.

Having ads on the new YouTube app will allow Apple iPhone users to see some videos that did not previously show up on the device. Certain YouTube contributors block the showing of their video if they cannot be paid from ads. Now that ads will be seen while watching YouTube on the iPhone, the inventory of videos should match what is available for Android users.

• Download Google's official YouTube app for iPhone [iTunes link]

source: YouTube blog, HoustonChronicle via Reuters