Way back in 2012, I wrote about Apple venturing into maps and the problems they were having. As I said at the time, getting good map data is extraordinarily hard—Google at the time had over 7,000 people working on their data—and it was going to be some time before Apple could catch up with Google.
That time, it appears, has come. Tech Crunch has a fairly long article reporting that Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up. Like Google, they have built new tools and assembled a large team to gather the data needed for a world class mapping application. After 4 years work, Apple is expecting to release their new maps for the San Francisco and Bay Area with iOS 12. Other areas will roll out over the next year.
Being Apple, the company has built in privacy from the beginning. No person ever sees the unsanitized data containing license plate numbers and faces: The data is encrypted as it’s gathered and the key is held by software that scrubs the privacy violating objects from it.
The other Apple-like feature is the attention to detail. Maps in Japan show more detail at an intermediate zoom level than a corresponding map in the U.S. would because that’s what the two cultures expect. Apple even licensed the fonts used by, say, the NY subway system so the signs on the maps would look the same to users. There are other examples as well. Read the article for the details. Even if you aren’t an Apple user, the article is an interesting discussion of the technical problems Apple has had to solve in building their new maps.