Google’s custom-tailored iGoogle site for iPhone users has quietly disappeared, leaving iPhone users unceremoniously redirected to the more generic, standard iGoogle for mobile portal instead. Perhaps the move is just another in Google’s spate of recent cuts, but it could also be a sign that the company is less willing to provide special treatment to Apple and its iPhone users, especially now that its own Android-powered G1 is on the market.
The first iPhone complaints hit Google’s support forums last Friday. A Google employee simply known as “Paul” responded with this:
We’ve decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We’ve found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones — we want to ensure you’ll all see the same version. Most or all of your existing content should translate over to the standard mobile version. The only exception would be any gadgets that aren’t compatible with most mobile browsers.
Unfortunately, this did nothing to calm the disgruntled iPhone crowd. The standard iGoogle for mobile page is far less feature-rich than the now-defunct iPhone version, and as several on the forum point out, it would have been a better move to bring the standard page up to the iPhone’s level, not the other way around.
One poster posited that the move is typical of a company getting set to release less-than-rosy financials:
This is the kind of move that a company does right before it releases a quarterly report that falls significantly short of previous guidance.
Others see it as a move to hurt Apple while propping up Android:
For a while there it did look like the iPhone was receiving all kinds of special development efforts. The powers to be had to be saying – look guys why are you spending all this time singling out the iPhone when we really need to be pushing the Android. So they probably cut back drastically on the iPhone development team and decided to just treat the iPhone like every other phone (except the Android).
Either way, Google now has a ton of disgruntled iPhone users on its hands, and that’s something it can’t well afford. Most recent market numbers reported by Silicon Alley Insider show that HTC and T-Mobile sold just 300,000 G1 phones in Q4 2008, vs. the more than 1.75 million iPhones sold in the same quarter. And as the Insider’s Dan Frommer says:
Google’s long-term success doesn’t rely on Android: Google’s long-term interest is mostly to get more people using the mobile Web on their phones (and other non-PC devices) so they could see (and click on) more Google-brokered ads. Ad clicks are just as valuable on iPhones as Google phones.
That is until users, like the mobile-savvy iPhone crowd, get disgruntled enough to stop clicking.
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