Apple Expands Native Maps Rating and Review Feature to the U.S.

The worst is when you want to look at more than 3 pictures from the restaurant and it takes you to the App Store to redownload Yelp. This will be a welcome addition, I just wish they allowed text to be inputted so we can fully replace Yelp!

Finally, I hate having to open the Yelp app just to read a review or see some pictures. Sometimes deciding between two restaurants or which landmark to visit in a short trip is based on reviews, I think this feature is great.

Wow! this is going to be very helpful. Welcome Addition to Maps.

I hate having to deal with the YELP and GOOGLE.

This is stupid, why build what they can just buy? They should just have bought Yelp. With all the weird and confusing acquisitions all these companies do throughout the years, seems the more obvious ones escape them.

On the flip side, why buy something you can build and source yourself?

This is stupid, why build what they can just buy? They should just have bought Yelp. With all the weird and confusing acquisitions all these companies do throughout the years, seems the more obvious ones escape them.

Yelp reviews aren’t entirely reliable because people go to review sites/apps for two primary reasons:

A. They’re looking for reviews
B. They had a bad experience and want to complain

The third and just as important reason isn’t compelling enough to visit a site/app and spend time reviewing: they liked the place.

Ditching the star system is the first good move. A simple thumbs up or down, is going to yield a more universal standard. Written reviews almost always skew negative. People generally write good reviews if the place was off the charts amazing or if they were given an incentive (monetary, promotional, discounts).

Finally, reviews are only as reliable as the most recent ones. Good reviews from years ago may not mean much if the place hasn’t renovated in a long while, the rotating staff of waiters are currently lazy/rude and the star chef hasn’t worked there in a while. Similarly, bad reviews might’ve compelled a business to improve or the place was so bad that it has shut down. So a back catalogue of reviews isn’t all that valuable. Yelp doesn’t have much of an edge due to its ”head start”.

All of this comes together as poor data quality and so Apple doesn’t need Yelp to gradually assemble a more accurate sense of reviews. With its established user base of hundreds of millions, and with the ratings built in natively, Apple can get recent reviews rather quickly. Ultimately, being natively integrated, that picture you took of a steak dinner can be recognized as food by Photos’ machine learning and correlated to the GPS coordinates of a restaurant you went to. A simple prompt by Siri “Did you like it?” with a thumbs up/down, can help Apple fill in those reviews over a short period of time.


UPDATE: This just showed up for me in Canada. I’m a Canadian user with a Canadian Apple ID on iOS 15 Beta 6 Looks like we’re getting a wider rollout.


I was able to add photos to public art in Maps.

Yeah I hate seeing Yelp reviews in Maps. I hope this means that Yelp is going away sooner rather than later.

Yelp does nothing but ruin honest businesses with their predatory practices. I am hoping the Apple solution will be little more tolerable for small business owners.