Apple Maps Could Soon Offer Travel Recommendations

Once upon a time, digital maps applications were designed to simply let you find your way around, but as the competition has heated up, they’ve become considerably more, with Google Maps — the “800lb gorilla” of mapping services — now offering restaurant recommendations, business reviews, and even a borderline social networking experience.

Google has always been out ahead of the pack, and it had a seven-year head start on Apple’s own mapping platform, but the iPhone maker has been closing the gap, recently introducing features like indoor maps of malls and airports back in 2017, and more recently the iOS 13 Look Around feature that offers a street-level view of what’s around a given location, compete with AR-style tags.

In fact, although Apple originally outsourced most of its mapping data, over the past two years it’s been working to bring it all in-house, sending out its own fleet of mapping vehicles across the U.S., Canada, and other countries. However, despite the move to first-party maps, one area in which Apple is still dependent on data from other sources is when it comes to reviews and recommendations, which are largely powered by third-party services like Yelp.

This could be set to change, however, with a new job listing spotted by The Verge suggesting that Apple is looking to begin editorializing and offering its own opinions for locations found in Apple Maps.

A ‘Maps Writer/Editor’

The new job listing, which appeared briefly this week but has since been deleted, was captured by The Verge, and was seeking a “Product Manager – Maps, Writer/Editor” to be based in Culver City, California.

The job was described as helping to “build and grow a brand-new content category for the Apple Maps team,” by working with both groups inside of Apple as well as “strategically meaningful external partners.”

Additional clues as to exactly what Apple is up to here include comments like building “exciting and engaging editorial content to help Maps users explore their world,” and asking that applicants have an “insatiable curiosity for discovering new places and a passion for telling the world in an engaging manner,” as well as “knowledge of food, travel, and shopping trends.”

So it seems like a move by Apple to not only reduce it dependency on Yelp — a service that often includes user comments and reviews that might not be the ideal image that Apple wants to put forward in its Maps app — but also to go more toe-to-toe with Google Maps, which is leading the more social mapping game through features like its Local Guides program in select cities, a built-in recommendation engine that offers up suggestions, and even the ability for users to poll their friends for recommendations.

It’s a little bit less clear what the results of Apple’s initiative might be Certainly the company would have to build a much larger and more sophisticated team to be able to actually replace Yelp reviews of individual locations, but The Verge suggests that it could follow in the footsteps of the “Today” tab that was added to the App Store three years ago, with curated stories on travel destinations and even local attractions in certain cities.