CBC News reports on Strava’s lawsuit against Garmin, which alleges patent infringement and breach of contract. Strava claims that Garmin is violating Strava’s patents relating to heatmaps and segments, and also says Garmin’s new developer guidelines require the Garmin logo to be present in every single post and image: “We already provide attribution for every data partner, but Garmin wants to use Strava and every other partner as an advertising platform.” Athletes who rely on both Garmin and Strava are just a bit concerned. (It may be worth mentioning that Strava added restrictions on third-party apps to its own API last year: see DC Rainmaker and The Verge.) Garmin isn’t commenting (pending litigation, etc., etc.).
Category: Mobile
The Unofficial Street View Economy
Back in September 2024, Phil Edwards explored the hidden, unofficial economy Google Street View, where third parties spend money and resources uploading 360-degree imagery to promote a region or tourist attraction or local business or whatever, in this 22½-minute YouTube video.
Some Asian Updates to Online Maps
Google has announced that Street View imagery is now available for Nepal.
Meanwhile, Apple observers are reporting that cycling directions are rolling out for Hong Kong and Taiwan in Apple Maps (AppleInsider, MacRumors).
Update, 22 Aug: And Singapore gets the Detailed City Maps treatment in Apple Maps.
Apple Maps Roundup
9to5Mac notes two features coming to Apple Maps as of iOS 26 this fall: natural language search and commute notifications.
Meanwhile, Apple Maps briefly failed to treat Ontario’s Highway 407 as a toll road earlier this month, in what was probably an updating error. (The 407 is a fairly expensive toll freeway, but it’s split between privately and provincially owned sections; the province is removing tolls on its section, but Apple apparently applied that change to the whole route.)
A Map in Every Pocket
It’s been more than 18 years since Steve Jobs demonstrated Google Maps on the then-prototype iPhone, and it’s hard to wrap one’s head around how transformational the fact that every mobile phone comes with a detailed, always up-to-date map of the world. James Killick makes the point in the final installment of his “12 Map Happenings that Rocked Our World”:
Well today there are estimated to be 7.2 billion smartphones in use around the planet. They are used by 4.7 billion people.2 That’s about 58% of the world’s population.
And every one of those devices has access to a maps app. And every maps app has a map of the planet.
So, if you boil it all down: at least one out of every two people on the planet now has a detailed map of the whole world in their pocket.
Process that thought. Before smartphones with data plans, car navigation meant GPS receivers with onboard maps that needed to be manually updated, often for a fee, or they’d slowly go out of date. And before that? Well, discussion of that (example 1, example 2) is a good way to make people feel old on the Internet. It meant a needing to own collection of paper maps. It meant knowing how to navigate from a map, which ain’t nothing—and was never universal. It meant asking for directions if you didn’t, or if you didn’t have the map you needed.
“A GPS in every pocket is one of the few truly great things about the smartphone age,” wrote Jeff Veillette on Bluesky, and I’m hard pressed to disagree. It will be harder for half the world’s population to get themselves lost: how is that anything but an unalloyed good?
Designing Thematic World Maps for Smartphones
World maps tend to be wide (horizontal, landscape), whereas mobile phone screens tend to be tall (vertical, portrait). This makes world maps small and hard to see on phones: a problem when you’re trying to present data via a thematic world map (e.g. a choropleth map) on a web page, especially if you’re trying to show data on smaller countries. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung recently did a user study to test the efficacy of two map designs—one that splits continents up and portrays them in different scales to make them more legible on vertical screens, the other a hemispheric bubble map. The results were published in The Cartographic Journal; lead author Jonas Oesch provides a summary in this blog post. [Ralph Straumann]
AllTrails and AI-Generated Hiking Trails
Last month the hiking app AllTrails announced AI-generated (“leveraged”) custom routes as part of a new premium membership plan, and some people are worried about it. According to the National Observer, AllTrails and other hiking apps have gotten hikers into trouble because they rely on crowdsourced trail information, which isn’t necessarily official or safe. Given generative AI’s track record for producing spectacularly erroneous results, there would appear to be some cause for concern. Except that “AI” has become a marketing buzzword that covers a lot of computer stuff, from less problematic machine learning (which is what I’d expect in this case) along with more problematic generative AI/large-language models, and AllTrails isn’t indicating which flavour they’re referring to (because: buzzword). And as the National Observer points out, “These problems already existed before the AI was added.” To be sure, generative AI is a blight on human civilization, but let’s be clear about our targets in this case.
Some Minor Updates to Apple and Google Maps
In what seems like a relatively minor update, Apple Maps will learn your preferred routes and remember visited places as of iOS 26, coming this fall. Meanwhile, Google Maps has announced some sustainable travel updates: recommending alternatives to driving, cycling route details, fuel-efficient routing, and marking low-emissions zones in Europe.
Online Maps Updates, Late March 2025 Edition
An updated disclosure on Apple’s website spotted by 9to5Mac says that imagery collected in support of the Look Around feature of Apple Maps (Apple’s Street View equivalent) will also be used to train Apple’s generative AI. Meanwhile, a recent Apple Maps glitch displayed baggage claims at ridiculously high zooms, and a Google Maps glitch deleted Timeline data for some users.
Apple Maps Surveyor
Last week Apple launched Maps Surveyor, a mapping app with a specific purpose, MacRumors reports. “The app is not public facing and appears to be for use with companies that Apple partners with to assign mapping tasks. […] Strings in Apple’s Surveyor app found by MacRumors suggest that once assigned a mapping task by the Premise app, Premise users will be instructed to attach an iPhone to a mount, rotate the iPhone to landscape orientation, and capture images along a route while driving using the Surveyor app.” In other words, it’s the user end of a crowdsourcing pipeline that funnels local data to Apple Maps via a third party “task marketplace.” Not something most of us would ever use.
Apple Exploring Advertising in Maps
There’s talk of ads coming to Apple Maps—at least, Apple is said to be exploring the possibility—which, online consternation notwithstanding, is something Google has had forever—when you get right down to it, Google Maps was a way to provide location based search results, and search results were always monetized with ads. Apple started out using its services as loss leaders for its pricey hardware products; now those services are expected to make money themselves.
Google Maps: Rounded Corners and Live Updates
When not getting into trouble over which name of a certain international body of water to show to which users, Google continues to turn out smaller updates around the corners of their map services. No seriously, the corners: they’re more rounded in the Google Maps app now. Also, Google Maps supports Android’s Live Updates, viz., your ETA shows up in the status bar (which I admit is neat).
Google Maps at 20
Google Maps launched 20 years ago today. Here’s what I posted at the time:
First impressions. This is frigging amazing, with smooth scrolling and zooming: you’re not constantly reloading pages like in MapQuest. Huge mapping surface. And drop shadows. […] I’m impressed by the detail. They’ve got my area, which is kind of a rural backwater: they’ve got the roads all named, but strangely not the towns. Oh well, data’s rarely perfect—especially when it’s just a beta launch. And for a beta this is awfully impressive.
A flurry of additional announcements followed in quick sucession: the launch of Google Earth, the Maps API that enabled people to build their own maps on top of Google’s interface. The mid-2000s were a busy time for online maps, let me tell you. I had so much to keep up with.
The development and origins of Google Maps, and Google Earth, are the subject of the latest and timely installment of James Killick’s “12 Map Happenings that Rocked Our World.” It seems that the Maps side of things was largely about providing Google search results through a map interface, and when you look at Google’s post commemorating the 20th anniversary, which highlights 20 features of Google Maps, it’s clear how expansive that idea has become.
James also makes reference to a book I somehow completely missed when it came out: Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality, an insider history by Google project manager Bill Kilday. (Harper Business, 2018). Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
Watch Duty
In the wake of the recent wildfires in southern California, Watch Duty—a simple, free app that provides real-time fire maps and alerts, and which prizes, and is prized for, accurate data, collated by its volunteer reporters—has become the most popular app on the App Store and is being hailed as an essential lifeline: see The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Verge, Washington Post (paywalls on some links).
Some Google Maps Updates
Google Maps imagery updates include improved satellite imagery thanks to an AI model that removes clouds, shadows and haze, plus “one of the biggest updates to Street View yet, with new imagery in almost 80 countries—some of which will have Street View imagery for the very first time.” The web version of Google Earth will be updated with access to more historical imagery and better project and file organization, plus a new abstract basemap layer. [PetaPixel]
Meanwhile, The Verge reports that Google Maps is cracking down on business pages that violate its policy against fake ratings and reviews.