Maps

After adding support for indoor maps in iOS 11, this year’s Apple Maps update will focus more on letting users keep track of their favourite places. Reports note that it will be easier for users to set frequent locations like home and work addresses, and then navigate to them, as well as creating groups of locations that they can add their own photos to. There’s also expected to be some interface improvements for navigating to suggested destinations.

We don’t believe that Apple normally cares too much about competing with third-party apps — after all, it makes no money from them directly, and it’s far better to encourage a strong App Store ecosystem, where the company does make money from its cut of paid apps — however in this case, we can see how its to Apple’s advantage to draw people to Apple Maps rather than Google Maps or Waze, since the quality of much of the data in its mapping service comes from anonymous crowdsourcing of things like traffic patterns. It’s the one area where Apple really does care about your data, albeit in an entirely anonymized form.