“According to 9to5Mac, Apple may be making ready the way to replace Google Maps with their own web-based mapping solution,” E. Werner Reschke writes for TGAAP.
“Currently on iCloud.com beta Apple maps are now being used for Find My iPhone,” Reschke writes. “While Apple still uses Google Maps on its website for retail store locations, it is not a stretch to see how Apple could soon replace Google Maps with Apple web-based maps instead. We can also think back to WWDC14 while Apple was showing off the enhanced Spotlight for OS X Yosemite, it was also replacing any web searches from Google’s search engine with Bing’s.”
“It is clear with every new move, Apple is setting a new direction — away from Google,” Reschke writes. “Apple is going right to the heart of Google’s main revenue stream — search and maps. It are these two apps that fund most of the other enterprises Google ‘gives away’ for free — including the development of the rival mobile platform Android.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Inexorably, the door closes, shutting out Google from the world’s most desirable customers. Apple harvests the wheat. Wallow in the chaff, Google.
As we wrote nearly three years ago on August 8, 2011:
Google will rue the day they decided to get greedy by working against Apple instead of with them.
As we explained back in November 2012:
Google made a crucial mistake: They gave away Android to “partners” who pushed and continue to push the product into the hands of the exact opposite type of user that Google needs for Android to truly thrive. Hence, Android is a backwater of second-rate, or worse, app versions that are only downloaded when free or ad-supported – but the Android user is notoriously cheap, so the ads don’t sell for much because they don’t work very well. You’d have guessed that Google would have understood this, but you’d have guessed wrong. Google built a platform that depends heavily on advertising support, but sold it to the very type of customer who’s the least likely to patronize ads.
iOS users are the ones who buy apps, so developers focus on iOS users. iOS users buy products, so accessory makers focus on iOS users. iOS users have money and the proven will to spend it, so vehicle makers focus on iOS users. Etcetera. Android can have the “Hee Haw” demographic. Apple doesn’t want it or need it; it’s far more trouble than it’s worth.
And, as we wrote back in September 2012:
Have fun tracking and trying to sell ads bound for your cheapskate “Buy One Get X Free” Fragmandroid pigeons. This is all Google’s loss: iOS users are the ones with money to spend and the will to spend it; you’ll have no access to hundreds of millions of the world’s cream-of-the-crop consumers…
That’s right, the world’s best, most well-heeled mobile consumers do not use Google Maps.
Meanwhile, Apple’s Maps will relentlessly continue to improve…
Let Google’s rueing continue unabated.
Related articles:
Apple drops Google for Bing as iOS, OS X default Spotlight search engine – June 4, 2014
Apple Maps puts the hurt on Google Maps – November 11, 2013
Apple Maps makes killer comeback as Google Maps loses access to world’s most desirable mobile customers – November 12, 2013
It won’t be easy to replace Google by Bing. It comes on Bing by default in Yosemite and I had to reverse back to Google since Bing is not fast enough to index new pages. For example search for swift code. I don’t find Google perfect but Bing is not there yet.
Yes, but even if only 25% of iOS users use Bing or Duck-Duck-Go instead of Google, that will hurt Google. A LOT. Google’s revenue streams from mobile are still not that significant and its PC revenue is dropping. Cutting out Google from a big chunk of IOS users is a BIG deal.
Based on some rough calculations, Google loses several hundred dollars per year for every user that opts to use alternatives to Google. Their losses are even greater when “premium” users shut them out of the personal data collecting loop that is at the core of Google’s business model. Millions of Apple customers will not change the default search engine back to Google thus Google will be out at least hundreds of millions of dollars per year, probably more because Apple customers are statistically more active, thus more valuable mobil web users.
Revisited those calculations. Google will experience $BILLIONS in lost revenue per year when they lose access to Apple customer data that they can sell to advertisers.
Well over a billion people use Google. If they are worth several hundred dollars each then Google would have revenues exceeding several hundred billion dollars per year. They don’t. Your figure is way off.
This looks like Tim Cook going ‘thermonuclear’ on Google — the slow burn, enervative radiation toxicity, in preference to a hot chain reaction. I think I like his style.
Whoogle?
I did my part.
I noticed a company was positioned incorrectly and I sent in a correction. A few days later it was corrected. I also tried to send in this correction about a year and nothing happened, but now it seems they are doing something about it.
This makes me happy. 😃
Apple has no choice but to shut out Google every way it can since Google is trying to be as equally ruthless.
Apple MUST get into their own Search service at some point soon and REALLY cut off Google oxygen.
I agree – WWDC 2015, the launch of apple search :))
From your post to God’s ears…
Imagine what a disaster that will be at release.
Guess what?
Google is doing just fine without Apple. Apple needs Google more than Google needs Apple these days!
Bullshit.
You got that bass ackwards.
Wait…..Google will be EX…..EX-Map, EX-Search….and lot more. May take a couple more years.
Apple has never needed google.
If it wasn’t for apple, google wouldn’t have been so successful.
Google stole apple’s IP and that made android and they’ve copied and stole from apple time and time again.
Without apple there would be no google.
That comment is utterly ridiculous. No company is beholden to another.
And thus the worlds manufacturing systems fall apart.
And would you like to produce even a smidgen of evidence for that bizarre statement. No? I thought not.
Eric, did they let you get out of your cage again?
Now all we need is an Apple search engine. And save the lectures about the greatness of DuckDuckGo. Another reason Apple would benefit besides hurting Google is the knowledge they’d gain from our search results. Apple could harness the information and make Siri and numerous other projects in the pipeline smarter and stronger. They don’t get tadvantage if it’s going to some other company.
MDN Take: “Android is a backwater of second-rate, or worse, app versions that are only downloaded when free or ad-supported – but the Android user is notoriously cheap, so the ads don’t sell for much because they don’t work very well.”
Agreed, but that seems to be the trend on iOS as well. Replace the buy it once model with in app purchases designed to milk you wallet or suffer ads forever and ever, amen.
Example
Asphalt 6 – buy it and own it.
Asphalt 8 – free and get milked for money 24/7/365 with no option to just buy the damn thing unlocked.
Siri is the future of both of Apple’s OSes.
Cortana is Microsoft’s answer to Siri. I expect to be on a first-name basis with both of them one day soon. ‘OK Google’ will, as a matter of competition, morph into a human personality as well. I shudder at the possibilities.
i sent in a correction a couple of weeks ago to move a place designation. i just checked – either they moved it – in the wrong direction or it hasn’t been fixed yet. in case you might be interested they have haviland cove in glens falls ny marked in the wrong place.
I know it’s faster to not capitalize, but in so doing, you devalue your comment by at least half.
Commas are nice too.
The whole “Google will rue the day” thing is overplayed.
Google could’ve been BFFs with Apple and allowed Microsoft to take over all things not Apple, or they could dive in and provide a platform for everything else Apple wasn’t going to partner or work with.
Did anyone expect Samsung, LG, Sony, Motorola, etc… to simply stop making phones? Did anyone really expect every consumer electronics company as well as other appliances in the Internet of Things, to simply throw their hands up in the air?
No, of course not. Google had a choice of continuing to offer services for iOS and OS X while extending everything to any other device they could or just being an app developer for Apple while Microsoft or someone else takes over everything else.
The whole thermonuclear war thing demonstrated how Jobs could be irrational and let his emotions get the better of him. Apple would’ve been better off having learned its lesson from the similar war with Microsoft earlier and simply moving on.
That said, Apple Maps moving to the Web is a great move by Apple with obvious benefits.
Fundamentally agree with that though the way Google stitched up and copied Apple was despicable. But as you say the damage had really been done to Microsoft which has been left incapable of leveraging its desktop dominance to the mobile sector to the benefit of Apple. Now while Google and Microsoft fight it out for the crumbs Apple can cream off the areas where it wants to operate. So swings and roundabouts really.
I see it a little differently — Google is a disease that needs to be stopped, and Apple can team with a hobbled Microsoft to effect that exigency
If Apple replaced the default search service with Bing or Yahoo, people would complain.
What Apple should do is place a pulldown menu in the search bar allowing customers to choose which search service they wish to use on “each” search, without having to go to preferences.
NOT to stick it to Google, but because it is what people would like.
I agree, I’m a big fan of Glims for desktop Safari. On the iPhone I use OmniSearch (requires jailbreak) which allows multiple sight search options from Spotlight.