Apple today announced that its revamped Maps app is rolling out in the Netherlands, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. The new experience provides more detail, improved navigation, custom-designed 3D models of popular landmarks, immersive turn-by-turn walking directions powered by augmented reality, and more.
A before and after look at Apple Maps in Switzerland
Look Around is also expanding to all of these countries starting today, offering high-resolution street-level imagery in the Maps app. The feature is similar to Google's Street View, but with smoother transitions when panning and zooming.
As noted by Apple Maps expert Justin O'Beirne and our readers, the redesign has also gone live in Saudi Arabia and Israel.
The revamped Apple Maps experience first launched in the U.S. in 2019 and has since expanded to the U.K., Ireland, Canada, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, France, Germany, and select other countries and territories.
(Thanks, Hidde Collee!)
Tag: Apple Maps
Top Rated Comments
at the moment the QC is garbage though
Public transport navigation is a nightmare as a commuter, because apple's algorithm basically selects one route, stop thinking, and puts the next cycles of that same route in the result screen, while often there are many different routes to a specific stop. It doesn't even take into account effective station departure times altered by delays, so a train that will take you to your destination that's right in front of your nose won't show up in the app, only the next one (even if that one is also delayed)
On top of that, it doesn't take into account transfer times at all. On my commute, it basically recommended a 1min transfer time as okay, ...to transfer across 6 platforms.
Compounded with the above issue it basically makes public transport navigation on it worthless as I can't pick any other route.
(I've notified apple of both bugs, but no response, obviously)
Cycle directions don't exist in NL, except in some cities, apparantly.
Discovery of properties is alright, but it's lighter on information than google is, and so sometimes I have had multi-year out-of-date information about certain companies, where another one had already moved in when the one on the map had closed down.
In general I'd say that I want to use Apple Maps, it's UI is very nice and not cluttered like google maps is, but it just lacks in features in general, and feels very neglected for Europe (minus UK)
The only reason I reasonably use it nowadays is because apple prioritises its own map app over google maps, so it shows up without unlocking my screen, and when public transport actually works, their notifications to get out are actually very accurate