A Microsoft lawyer says Google is blocking its attempts to launch a YouTube app on Windows Phone software, after the search giant pulled the application for a second time.
David Howard, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft’s Litigation & Antitrust division, says the firm has worked hard to meet Google’s specifications for the app, and that the search firm seems bent on blocking Microsoft’s attempts to offer users of its smartphones the same experience as they would have on an Android device, or Apple’s iPhone – which both feature a fully functioning YouTube app.
“The roadblocks Google has set up are impossible to overcome, and they know it,” Howard states. He claims the only sticking point in a program to comply with Google’s requests is the lack of HTML5 in the redesigned Windows Phone YouTube app – something Howard says is technically impossible at present.
“[W]e dedicated significant engineering resources to examine the possibility. At the end of the day, experts from both companies recognized that building a YouTube app based on HTML5 would be technically difficult and time consuming, which is why we assume YouTube has not yet made the conversion for its iPhone and Android apps.”
Howard concludes by stating that Google “just doesn’t want Windows Phone users to have the same experience as Android and Apple users, and that their objections are nothing other than excuses.”
Google claims it has removed Microsoft’s app because it breaches service agreements by not complying with a list of upgrades it required the software firm to meet, the BBC reports.