Since the release of Apple's in-house Maps app as part of iOS 6 back in 2012, Yelp has been the company's sole partner for integrating customer reviews of businesses and other points of interest. In recent days, however, Apple's Maps app has begun including reviews from TripAdvisor and Booking.com on select hotel listings.
It is currently unclear what the criteria are for determining whether a given hotel listing includes reviews from Yelp, TripAdvisor, or Booking.com, but based on a spot check of several cities, the vast majority of hotel listings in the United States continue to display Yelp reviews. Other types of business listings also continue to use Yelp reviews on Apple Maps.
Internationally, Booking.com in particular seems to be more strongly represented, with brief surveys of London, Paris, and Sydney all showing reviews from that site on a majority of hotel listings viewed.
Apple has yet to update its Maps acknowledgements page to note it is now sourcing TripAdvisor and Booking.com, citing only Yelp as a data partner for reviews.
Apple has been working hard to improve Maps since its rough launch in 2012 that saw Tim Cook issue an open letter apologizing to consumers for not meeting their expectations with the new Maps app. The company has since improved its directions and three-dimensional imagery, although other changes such as transit integration planned for iOS 8 last year were pushed back as Apple's mapping efforts have reportedly been hampered by internal politics.
One major improvement that appears to be in the works is street-level imagery similar to Google's Street View and Microsoft's Streetside for Bing Maps. Minivans outfitted with sensor arrays and apparently leased by Apple have been spotted in several areas around the United States, with the behavior of the vehicles on residential streets and in parking lots suggesting they are collecting street-level imagery.
Cool. I still find Google Maps to be so much better and more useful. I'm glad Apple Maps is improving but are people really using it? I'm definitely not.
I'm using it all the time.
I live in one of the top 10 biggest cities in the U.S., and Google maps is a mess. It puts my address down the street, it sends me to the wrong part of town for my work, and it tries to route you through the airport to get to the other side of town, which easily adds a half hour to your travel time.
Apple maps hardly ever steers me wrong. It's not as good at searching for POIs, but once it knows where's you're going, it's way better at giving directions than Google maps.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories, according to the Apple leaker and prototype collector known as "Kosutami." In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability. The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future. Kosutami has revealed...
Top Rated Comments
I tried a few months ago, but all I got was a message saying your number was disconnected for lack of imagination.. :D
#GoogleMaps #Flyover #choices
glad to see captain obvious.
I'm using it all the time.
I live in one of the top 10 biggest cities in the U.S., and Google maps is a mess. It puts my address down the street, it sends me to the wrong part of town for my work, and it tries to route you through the airport to get to the other side of town, which easily adds a half hour to your travel time.
Apple maps hardly ever steers me wrong. It's not as good at searching for POIs, but once it knows where's you're going, it's way better at giving directions than Google maps.