The battle of the giants is on. With three main competing platforms (iOS, Android and Windows Phone) each company tries as much as possible to have an upper hand. Apple doesn’t really do cross platform apps for mobile, but MS and Google have some on nearly every platform and they are popular.
It started with Apple removing Google Maps and YouTube from iOS in the 6th version of the OS. Soon after that Google has published their own apps to replace the stock ones on iOS, and they are great. At the same time Google refuses to make their maps app for Windows Phone and even tried blocking web versions from mobile IE.
Microsoft on the other hand now owns Skype (that has replaced the Messenger service just recently) and with each new version for iOS I see more and more things going wrong. The UI is messed up, clunky and slow. The general user experience design is cumbersome and hard to understand. There are annoying ads everywhere (which is not really THAT bad) but there’s also a ton of sync problems and unsent / unread IM’s. So far I’ve heard none of these complaints from WP users, so it’s almost as if it’s broken on purpose.
Will Google soon try and break their maps and youtube apps for iOS, to force users to switch to Android? Let’s hope not, because competition is better off when companies try to make something better than everyone else, not break stuff.