Google, Apple Vs. Google | featured news

Google Maps have found their way back to the iPhone. The world's most popular online mapping system returned late Wednesday with the release of the Google Maps' iPhone app.

YouTube is being reprogrammed for the iPhone and iPad amid the latest fallout from the growing hostility between Google and Apple. The changes are being made because Google Inc. and Apple Inc. didn't renew a five-year licensing agreement that established YouTube's video service as one of the built-in applications in the operating system that runs the iPhone and iPad.

Google Inc CEO Larry Page and Apple CEO Tim Cook have been conducting behind-the-scenes conversations about a range of intellectual property matters, including the ongoing mobile patent disputes between the companies, according to people familiar with the matter.

The latest numbers are in: Android is on top, followed by iOS in a distant second. This word comes from Gartner, a top research firm for these sorts of things. Overall, within the last quarter, Android outsold iOS devices nearly three to one while capturing 64% of the worldwide market share. Samsung was the top dog accounting for 90M handset sales.

It looks like one of the iPhone's signature default applicaitons is about to dissapear, with Apple telling the press Monday that its "license to include the YouTube app in iOS has ended," after developers found the video app had vanished from the beta version of Apple's latest mobile operating system. [...]

Pitting Google search against Siri using a monster 1600-question test shows how useful Siri really is: not at all. Google answered correctly 86 percent of the time. Siri achieved just 68 percent accuracy. At that point, it's not much better than a crystal ball.

Google, undaunted by a short-lived attempt to sell a smartphone on its own, is now pushing into Apple's iPad market by selling tablets directly to consumers than an online store.

According to one analyst, Apple made $1 billion from Google last year to make it the default search engine in Safari.

The web giant and other ad companies bypassed privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser on mobile devices and computers – tracking the online habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.

For two years, Apple has told the world that phones running on Google Android operating system are iPhone rip-offs. Now Apple is about to learn whether a U.S. trade agency thinks its claims have merit.