Apple Maps hasn’t really been a huge success, but it looks like Apple is finally working to fix that. According to a new report, the company is set to completely overhaul Apple Maps, with the first results of this work to roll out in the next iOS 12 beta.
Apple Maps didn’t exactly skyrocket to popularity the way Apple may have hoped. After a bumpy launch in 2012, the company tried to quickly patch the service and make it usable, and while these days it is usable, it certainly doesn’t compete with the wealth of data available in Google Maps. The solution? Apparently, it’s a total overhaul of Apple Maps, according to TechCrunch.
Apple has been collecting Maps-related data through iPhones over the past few years, and has even created a fleet of cars packed with cameras and sensor to collect more data. The new version of Apple Maps is reportedly launching in iOS 12 and will be available in the San Francisco Bay Area at launch, with the rest of Northern California to come this fall. Apple continued on to say that it be rolling the new Maps out, section by section, to different parts of the U. S. over the next year. You’ll first start seeing the results of Apple’s work in the next iOS 12 beta.
According to TechCrunch, Apple’s work on Maps will result in better visuals, improved context awareness, responsiveness to changes like roadwork, and showing things like pedestrian paths. In other words, this is a complete overhaul of Apple Maps — and one that should make it a whole lot more helpful.
“Since we introduced this six years ago — we won’t rehash all the issues we’ve had when we introduced it — we’ve done a huge investment in getting the map up to par,” Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue told TechCrunch. “We’ve done a huge investment of making millions of changes, adding millions of locations, updating the map and changing the map more frequently.”
Cue said Apple wanted to build the”best map app in the world” — something that requires rebuilding Maps from the ground up. That includes using first-party data, rather than relying on the third-party data that Apple relied on for Maps at launch.
Part of the Maps revamp is collecting data from iPhones, though Apple is quick to point out that it does so with privacy in mind. For example, it won’t collect data that lets it figure out where a person is going — instead, it collects subsets of data.
