Originally Posted By: tonyc
The amazing thing about Apple's own goal is that there was reportedly more than a year left on the existing contract with Google for maps, so even if they knew they wanted to file for divorce, there was time to beef up their own offering before parting ways.

The maps deal was set to expire in June 2013. That would put the expiration right in the middle of the iOS 6 lifetime, when iOS 7 would just be entering beta. Apple would have to insert the new maps, including the underlying framework changes at a time when no one would be prepared for it. Major framework changes in iOS are saved for X.0 releases, not X.1/X.2 releases.

They chose to launch maps when they did to try and avoid a larger disaster of many third party apps also breaking. Showing it at WWDC, and using the new maps in beta for almost 4 months allowed enough time to ensure proper compatibility without running into a deadline. App developers could work directly with Apple engineers onsite to overcome the initial major hurdles. It also fixes the problem of not having navigation for yet another cycle, when Android competition is getting stronger. Brand recognition of Samsung is rising, and to not have navigation of the box is a serious black eye. Time will tell if that black eye would have been smaller then the damage to their reputation from launching now. They had to switch at some point. I don't think another year would have improved most of the errors I've seen, compared to a few weeks in users hands reporting problems.

Originally Posted By: tonyc
That's a possibility, but that calls into question why they had to call this release IOS6 in the first place.

Obviously "IOS 5.1" doesn't push units the way "IOS 6" does, but from what I've seen, people are more excited about the new hardware than the OS upgrade.

iOS 6 does introduce a number of new user facing features, along with a lot of new and changed frameworks for developers. Some of these features though won't be highly user visible until developers take advantage of them. Even skinning wise, iOS 6 saw some deep changes. Looking at iOS history release, these always come in on X.0 releases too. X.1 and X.2 have not added the type of changes they made to the OS user wise. Unlike Android where Google has decoupled most of the major apps from the OS, Apple still keeps them tightly integrated.