“Once upon a time, Google made Apple an offer it thought they couldn’t refuse: Give us access to all your customers’ location data and let us serve them ads in Maps, or do without critical features like vector tiles and turn-by-turn navigation. But Apple did refuse. And hard. And that meant the clock was suddenly ticking on Apple Maps. Fast,” Rene Ritchie writes for iMore. “Apple had always made the Maps interface on iPhone and had been considering building its own map data for a while. Almost certainly, though, it thought it had more time.”
“Now it was in a mad dash to rip out Google and replace it in time for the launch of iOS 6. So Apple had to license all the data it could from TomTom, Open Street Map, Yelp, and others,” Ritchie writes. “Because the data were all from different companies, it was all in different formats, and Apple’s aggregation, cleansing, and coherency did not go well — and, in many places, it went terribly.”
“As a result, the director in charge of Maps — who previously spearheaded the hugely successful Mobile Safari project — was let go and Tim Cook was compelled to issue an unprecedented apology,” Ritchie writes. “Around the same time, though, Apple began ramping up an entirely new Apple Maps project. Or, perhaps, the Apple Maps project as it should have been and was meant to be.”
“The new Apple Maps is starting its Bay Area, California roll out today,” Ritchie writes. ” Here’s why that’s so important to Apple, us, and our collective future.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
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