Maybe in isolation. But combined with two other similar WP8/Google stories within the last week, both clearly driven by commercial issues, the case for this not being a technical issue either becomes stronger.

Or its a no one uses wp8 issue that applies to all of gooogle's portfolio. Google didn't keep maps of iPhone, even though that could have sold 10 million androids.

It's totally reasonable for Google to decide they don't want to spend the resources to support WP8 due to low usage. But here they were taking an apparently already working (even if not officially supported) site and breaking it. That's a bit less reasonable, but it could admittedly still be a technical issue.

But that clearly can't be the case for the GMail and Youtube issues. Google still continues supporting the Exchange sync protocols for business users, so there's little technical benefit in disabling it for another class of users. Likewise Google is under no obligation to make a native WP8 Youtube app -- but given they've given partners API access to Youtube in the past, clearly there's no technical reason why they couldn't also open up the API for MS to use. In either case there's no plausible way the low market share of WP8 could be the explanation.

Now, of course both of these cases could have totally benign explanations. Maybe the licensing terms of ActiveSync make it undesirable for Google to support it for free users in the future. Perhaps MS and Google can't come to a reasonable agreement about Youtube API licensing terms, and the real villain of the story is MS for trying to now score cheap publicity points with it. Or maybe Google is trying its best to smother WP8 in the cradle. And you can't ignore these other data points when looking at the motivations for these petty Maps changes.

If anyone has a counterexample I'd love to hear it, but so far as I know no one other than Microsoft (and, until recently, Google) offers Exchange ActiveSync to free users. In my opinion, that strongly suggests that Microsoft's licensing terms for ActiveSync make that economically unsustainable. If that's right, you would expect Google to drop free EAS support once the major benefit of better iPhone support was superseded by a native Gmail app, Windows Phone or no Windows Phone. One of the planned benefits of buying Sparrow, I suspect. That ''under $25 million" needed to be justified, after all.

Active sync has licensing costs to Microsoft. And Microsoft complains that Google doesn't want to pay them except for business users.

AFAIK they did keep turn-by-turn directions off iOS though. It's been a while since I've used an iPhone so I can't readily verify that.

They didn't, it's fully featured. In some ways it's even better than the Android app, more beautifully designed. They mentioned in their blog they'll be bringing much the same to Android soon.

Good to know. Thanks.

Why would they silently redirect? Why not have a closeable banner that reads "Your browser may not support features necessary to run this website."

Also feature detection would be preferable to user agent detection.

The same that it has blocking a decent YouTube app on windows phone