>Only music you have purchased through your phone's marketplace may be played, and only to an authorized device.
Is music piracy still a hot button issue that would motivate Google/Apple to remove the headphone jack? I'd imagine that most people that care about ownership are in the shrinking minority - the rest already don't own their music and streaming it via Spotify/Apple/Play.
Well, aside from that, it was the only interface that used a standard connector and an unobtrusive driver library. You could run data in and out through the jack. But now all that's left is the proprietary lightning port and the wifi stack which could have all sorts of undocumented filtering or restrictive behavior in its driver. So it also locks the phone down further in that regard.
Is music piracy still a hot button issue that would motivate Google/Apple to remove the headphone jack? I'd imagine that most people that care about ownership are in the shrinking minority - the rest already don't own their music and streaming it via Spotify/Apple/Play.