Apple's Maps app rebuild continues its journey across North America this week, with the company following its pattern of rolling out the enhanced maps in adjacent continental U.S. states.
Apple has been deploying the enhanced maps up the northeast United States over the last few months, with the rollout recently extending to New York state. Now it has expanded west to cover West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and North Illinois.
You can spot the updated regions by looking for more landscape details like sports fields, parking lots, ground cover, foliage, pools, pedestrian pathways and the like.
The data is gathered by Apple's own fleet of sensor- and camera-equipped vehicles, as well as first-party data gathered from iPhones using Apple's differential privacy. The combined data is also being made to ensure search results are more relevant.
The improvements initially rolled out in Northern California in July 2018, followed by Hawaii and Southern California in November 2018, and Arizona, New Mexico, and the Las Vegas metropolitan area in April 2019.
At WWDC 2019, Apple said the updated maps will roll out to the entire United States by the end of the year, followed by additional countries in 2020.
(Thanks, Brian!)
Top Rated Comments
But now iOS and Mac Apps ship with mission critical features broken and severe bugs that brick devices?
This isn't really related to the article is it? Actually I believe it was because he didn't take ownership of the quality of the release at the time - which was really bad.
Not related to the article again. But this isn't new, Apple has had issues with new releases going way back. Leopard was one I was around for, that was rough as well. I don't install updates with big OS changes for a couple of months because you know there will be alot of bugs, its an easy call.
We got a super good release with iOS 12 last year, that may have set people's expectations too high, because it was a bug fix release (with a few new things added), much like Snow Leopard was back in the day.
Gosh you haven't been reading GeekWebGuides much eh? Because there have been lots of articles on the updates to Apple Maps for years but in particular in the last couple of years when they've been making big changes.
- full rollout takes about 6 weeks, all users should have the updates after that
- until then, some people will get the updates and some won’t
- there is no rhyme or reason to get them, they just show up
- if you get the update, they may come and go until the 6 weeks pass
ETA for the Forstall worshippers here: Really, if Forstall were a god of software engineering, another company would have hired him as an executive by now with a blank check for his salary. The issue is that no one wants him because he’s a terrible colleague.