Apple’s operating system upgrades this year seem to be focusing on scores of small improvements along with a ton of AI integrations so it’s no surprise that announced upgrades to Apple Maps in iOS/
Google has added the country of Georgia to Street View. This was a partnership with the Georgian government, so it’s no shock that Abkhazia and South Ossetia are not part of the package.
Claims circulating on social media that Apple erased towns and villages in southern Lebanon from Apple Maps as a kind of support for the Israeli invasion are not true, says Apple. Apple’s coverage of Lebanon has never been that great: the towns and villages were never on the map in the first place. But I suppose the people circulating the claim never bothered to look at Lebanon in Apple Maps before this. [AppleInsider]
Previously (and similarly): Google Didn’t Stop Obscuring Imagery of Russian Military Sites Because the Imagery Hadn’t Been Obscured in the First Place.
Per Apple’s announcement of its new Apple Business platform, ads are indeed coming to Apple Maps.
Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.
Apple maintains that the ad platform will come with user privacy protections. “A user’s location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user’s Apple Account. Personal data stays on a user’s device, is not collected or stored by Apple, and is not shared with third parties.”
From last year: Apple Exploring Advertising in Maps; Ads Coming to Apple Maps: Report.
MacRumors reports that Flyover city tours in Apple Maps appear to have been discontinued as of iOS 26. The Flyover imagery itself remains; this is about the feature that led the user from landmark to landmark using that imagery, which I guess wasn’t used much. It doesn’t happen very often, but online maps do retire features from time to time (Google has retired standalone apps for My Maps and Street View, for example).
An update on ads coming to Apple Maps. AppleInsider, citing a paywalled report from Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter: “[T]he decision has been taken to move ahead with the project. The claim is that starting as soon as 2026, Apple will allow businesses to pay to have their entries in some way displayed more visibly within Apple Maps.”
Previously: Apple Exploring Advertising in Maps.
TechCrunch: “South Korea is nearing a decision on whether to allow Google and Apple to export high-resolution geographic map data to servers outside the country. The detailed maps, which use a 1:5,000 scale, would show streets, buildings, and alleyways in far greater detail than currently available on these platforms. However, several regulatory and security hurdles remain unresolved.” South Korea, which is technically still at war with North Korea, restricts data from the National Geographic Information Institute from being used outside the country, and has denied previous requests from both Google and Apple; Google, which stores its map data outside South Korea, has hitherto had to make use of less-detailed, lower-resolution data.
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.
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.)
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.
Apple announced last week that Apple Maps will now display Indigenous lands, place names and other content in Australia and New Zealand.
Beginning today, Apple Maps now displays Indigenous lands in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. By gathering information from Indigenous advisors, cartographers, Traditional Owners, language holders, and community members, Apple Maps will show reserves and Indigenous Protected Areas, Indigenous place names, Traditional Country, and dual-language labels. Indigenous lands place cards feature information about the local area and Traditional Owners, and can be curated to allow communities to add their own photos, destinations on their land, and text in their own language. Representation of Indigenous lands in Apple Maps provides users with a more comprehensive experience while also recognising the stories and significance behind them.
More at the Guardian. This follows Apple’s move to show Indigenous lands in Canada and the U.S. in 2023. [Lat × Long]
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.
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.
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.
Two long reads on Apple, Google and the Gulf of America nonsense. Miguel García looks the history of places with multiple names, and how Google Maps in particular has handled them, using the Matterhorn (Mont Cervin, Monte Cervino) as an uncontentious example. John Gruber, whose Daring Fireball blog has covered the Apple side of the tech world for more than two decades, has a bracing, no-punches-pulled take that covers the utter lunacy of the name change, Google’s and Apple’s history of obeisance to autocratic regimes and the excessive compliance involved in showing “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)” to the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, even Fox News and Newsmax are among the 40 news organizations who’ve signed on to a White House Correspondents Association letter protesting the White House’s blacklisting of the Associated Press for refusing to comply with the “Gulf of America” edict.
Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much; More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’; Google and the Gulf; ‘Gulf of America’: Apple Conforms, AP Punished for Not Doing So; ‘Gulf of America’ Isn’t Going Over Well; Is ‘Gulf of Mexico’ Worth Fighting For?; ‘Gulf of America’: Compliance and Resistance.
While it was reported that Apple would comply with the “Gulf of America” renaming, I wasn’t sure what Apple would do outside the U.S.; now it appears that it will follow Google’s lead and show both names. Above is what I see in Canada; I wonder what Apple is showing Mexican users.
Meanwhile, Axios, citing its mainly U.S. audience, is adopting “Gulf of America” (HuffPost, The Hill, The Wrap) but had this to say about the White House blacklisting the Associated Press: “At the same time, the government should never dictate how any news organization makes editorial decisions. The AP and all news organizations should be free to report as they see fit. This is a bedrock of a free press and durable democracy.”
The name change is broadly unpopular and people are finding ways to resist it. If “Gulf of America” becomes a way to signal compliance with the regime, it looks like “Gulf of Mexico,” even on a t-shirt (which I’ve seen already), will signal noncompliance.
Bryce Bostwick has released a Chrome extension that restores “Gulf of Mexico” to Google Maps. As he says, “There are a lot of scary executive orders being issued right now. This is not one of the most important ones. But it might be the easiest to defy.” This apparently took some reverse engineering, as he explains in a 24-minute video.
MapQuest—remember MapQuest?—has not as yet complied with the Trump executive order; in fact, they’ve decided to have some fun with it, with a tongue-in-cheek tool that allows you to rename the Gulf yourself.
Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much; More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’; Google and the Gulf; ‘Gulf of America’: Apple Conforms, AP Punished for Not Doing So; ‘Gulf of America’ Isn’t Going Over Well; Is ‘Gulf of Mexico’ Worth Fighting For?
