A Mass of High-Tech Vans Have Been Unleashed to Prepare for Apple Map’s Big iOS 10 Upgrade

It’s a pretty special moment in one’s life when you see the Google Maps car for the first time. Keen observers, however, might have seen another car roaming the streets taking photos for a maps app – an Apple Maps van.

Apple announced last year that it would be sending out a fleet of cars aimed at collecting data for the Apple Maps app, and since then the company has been going full steam ahead at doing so.

It’s not like we needed big letters on the side of the van to tell us that we were looking at an Apple van, or at least a car collecting map-related data. The vans are mounted with quite a bit of equipment, located on the top of the van. This equipment includes cameras, which take street photos to enhance the street view on the maps app. Along with that are GPS sensors and LiDAR sensors, which ensure that maps are tagged with location-based data and that they’re placed where they should be on the map.

Image Courtesy of 9to5mac

The times that the vans have been spotted have also led to quite a lot of speculation – a number of people have seen the vans roaming the streets at night, suggesting that Apple might include a night-based street view, something that would give it a one up over its main competitor, Google Maps. Google does offer a few street view-like “Night Walks,” however this obviously isn’t the same as fully offering street view at night.

Of course, while Apple might be secretive about other car-related projects, it’s not hiding anything when it comes to the cars collecting Maps data. It even offers some information straight from its website.

“Apple is driving vehicles around the world to collect data which will be used to improve Apple Maps. Some of this data will be published in future Apple Maps updates,” “We are committed to protecting your privacy while collecting this data. For example, we will blur faces and license plates on collected images prior to publication. If you have comments or questions about this process, please contact us.”

On the website, users can even somewhat track the location of the vans, with the company offering the cities that the vans will be located at any given time frame.

All of this begs the question – what is Apple building up to with all of this. It’s unlikely that Maps will see small updates. Instead, it’s highly likely that we’ll see a major update to the app in Apple’s iOS 10, the next version of Apple’s mobile operating system. In fact, because the release of iOS 10 is within a year, we can expect the deployment of Apple’s vans to be on overtime for a while – at least until iOS 10 comes out or they’ve collected enough data for the update.

While Apple might get a small one-up on Google when it comes to the night-based street view, it’s fair to say that Google has a significant head-start when it comes to Maps. Google Maps has long been respected as the go-to app for both desktop and mobile mapping, and that’s not likely to change for a while.

What could change, however, is the customer trust level surrounding Apple Maps – when the app was first launched it was riddled with bugs, and while it has improved significantly since then, many stopped giving the app a chance. In order for this to change, it’s likely that Apple will need to seriously overhaul the app, something that it seems like it’s preparing to do for the iOS 10 update.

Of course, Apple and Google aren’t the only mapping companies, and now is certainly the time to increase customer trust, with automakers now looking to maps companies to integrate into their self-driving car systems. Systems being used in self-driving cars need to be extremely precise, not just for navigational purposes, but also for customer safety.

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