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meant GPS receivers with onboard maps that needed to be manually updated, often for a fee, or they’d slowly go out of date.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?
