Apple Boasts Insanely Massive Canadian Maps Expansion

In its biggest international expansion yet, Apple has officially rolled out its new and improved Apple Maps into the Great White North, expanding into Canada with everything from Guides to Look Around.

Considering that Canada is the second-largest country in the world by land mass, it’s not only a huge expansion — at 3.5 million square miles it’s more than twice as large as any that Apple has done to date — but what’s especially notable is that Apple hasn’t skimped on this rollout. In fact, Canada is now covered by Apple Maps more comprehensively than any other country.

For example, while you may have expected features like Look Around to only come to major urban centres like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, since that’s been Apple’s approach in the U.S., where it remains available today in only a dozen urban areas, covering 16% of the U.S. population, with its Canadian expansion Apple has pulled out all the stops to cover 99% of the country’s population.

Of course, one could argue that covering 99% of only 38 million people is much easier than 16% of 331 million, but the reality is that Look Around is at least as much about covering territory as it is about being available to more people, and while Canada only adds a fraction to the global population coverage, this single expansion has almost doubled Apple Maps coverage of Earth’s overall land area, jumping from 6.4% in October, after Ireland and the U.K. were added, to 12.5% today with the addition of the Canadian land mass.

In fact, as independent Apple Maps researcher Justin O’Beirne points out, Canada is actually just one big single continuous look around area, not only covering individual cities and some of the smallest towns in the country, but even the highways and byways in between. While O’Bierne lists the coverage area as “southern Canada” that really just excludes the extreme northern areas which make up less than 1% of the Canadian populace anyway.

For example, we found Look Around wasn’t available in places like Yellowknife (pop. 19,569) or Iqaluit (pop. 7,740), yet it is available in Latchford — a town in Northern Ontario with a population of only 313 people.

By comparison, Look Around in the U.S. is still confined only to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Houston, Seattle, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Honolulu, while in the U.K. it includes London and Edinburgh, as well Dublin, Ireland and Tokyo, Osaka, and four other cities in Japan.

Apple’s Canadian mapping project has been at least a couple of years in the making, and is an interesting example of the fruits of Apple’s labours, the images that are now available for the neighbourhood where we spotted an Apple Maps car back in late May 2019 are, in fact, dated “May 2019.”

In fact, the vast majority of images we’ve seen appear to have been captured in May or June 2019, suggesting that Apple had done the bulk of its fieldwork well over a year ago, although it’s fair to say that it takes quite a bit of time to not only process all of these images, but also ensure that all of the necessary privacy precautions are taken, such as blurring out things like faces and license plate numbers.

More Than Just Looking Around

Of course, there’s also a lot more to the new Apple Maps than just Look Around, and according to Apple’s announcement, it’s all landing in one fell swoop, including more detailed maps, better road coverage and pedestrian routing, and even several of the new features introduced in iOS 14 this year, including Guides, electric vehicle routing, and identification of speed and red-light cameras.

About the only thing that’s missing at this point is cycling directions, however the availability of that is considerably more limited at this point, confined to only New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco even in the U.S., plus London, U.K., and at least some parts of mainland China.

Notably, however, Apple has yet to update its Feature Availability page to include the Canadian expansion, and in fact the information found on the page is likely several months out of date, as even some of the recent additions in Japan haven’t been added either.

Apple’s new Guides feature is also available in major Canadian cities, including not only Lonely Planet but also local resources such as Toronto Life and Narcity.