Official YouTube app returns to Windows Phone

Windows Phone has had difficulties attracting app developers to develop popular apps for their platform. This has resulted in Microsoft taking the responsibility of developing some of the more popular apps, such as YouTube for their Windows Phone platform.

However, during spring this year, Microsoft and Google ended up in a conflict when Google demanded that Microsoft removed their self-developed YouTube app from the Windows Phone Store.

Google claimed that the app was developed without conforming to the developer agreements and breaks several functions and harms the ecosystem of YouTube. In particular, Google was against the fact that the app did not show advertisements and also allowed users to download the videos from YouTube easily. Something, which obviously hurts potential revenues from YouTube.

Eventually, Google and Microsoft settled on an agreement to jointly develop an app by the end of May, 2013. Today, the YouTube app that conforms to Google's policies has been launched. A peculiar point though, is that the app only shows Microsoft as developer and does not mention Google.

In any case, the app is available free of charge from Windows Phone Store and is compatible with Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 8.