There has been lots of speculation and commentary surrounding the recent discovery that Apple acquired PlaceBase and now the former CTO of said company works for “Apple Geo” team. What Apple are up to? Could they be building their own mapping app for iPhone and thus their own “Mapping Stack”. It would probably be a good idea, but I don’t think they can do it!
It wont be easy to build a competitive product and then convince users to switch from the current Google Maps app.
The above image may only be a simple icon, but behind that icon there is a lot of investment. The likes of Bing Maps, Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps have spent millions of dollars and 1000’s of man hours over several years to get their products where they are today. The barriers to entering this market these days is huge, no matter how big your company is. Even if you managed to acquire the best talent, it still won’t get you there much quicker. However, with Apple’s amazing design skills and PlaceBase technical knowhow, i am sure they will do a awesome job at taking digital cartography to places the GYM club never thought of. But that is the easy part, what about the rest? What about Routing, Geocoding, satellite imagery, street view, birds eye, business data and what/where parsing? What about refreshing this data every year or sometimes every hour? Its hard enough sourcing geodata and doing the business development, let alone writing one line of code. iPhones are available for 88 countries, do Apple really want to build a locally relevant Geocoding engine for 88 countries?
I don’t think they can do it, or want to do it, but i would be happy to be proved wrong! So, my feeling is they will have to partner with a provider to do all the hard bits (perhaps G), whilst Apple stick to the easy bits that will make them look great. Which will be some amazing looking maps (maybe even streamed vectors), I cannot wait to see!