I don’t know how this will ever make it through the app store for free when companies like Tom Tom charge upwards of $70 for their products, but Google has announced, in conjunction with the release of turn-by-turn navigation in the UK, that they will release a version of the software for the iPhone OS. What isn’t stated is when, and whether there will be a price attached (likely not).

If and when this happens, NavSat companies whose bread and butter these days are getting eaten away by free navigation alternatives, are likely going to have to come up with something new and innovative to keep the industry competitive and keep consumers paying for their products.

Garmin, the shrewd company that it is, previously partnered with Asustek to create a line of smartphones with their GPS software built in, first called the Nuvifone, which failed. Now it has a new, sleeker-looking device coming soon, called logically enough, the Garminfone. That will hit T-Mobile in the summer.

GPS is indispensable. There are so many uses for it, merely getting from one place to another is no longer its main purpose. Services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Yelp, even Twitter, rely on GPS to accurate place you in a given location and turn that space into valuable data, whether for marketers to target ads, or your friends, to locate you.

It’s unlikely the big names like Garmin and Tom Tom are going anywhere anytime soon. But this announcement must have made them a little shaky.