Date:
July 25, 2024
Apple Maps has remained exclusively accessible to its community. On Wednesday, a beta web version was released to expand its audience.
Apple Maps has been serving the exclusive community for over 12 years now. However, Google Maps has been dominating the overall navigation market, including Apple users who prefer it over the inbuilt app. In an effort to gain popularity among global navigation app consumers, Apple has launched the Apple Maps web version, which is available for anyone with a MAC, Windows PC, or Safari browser.
The web version of Apple Maps is currently available only in English. Apple plans to expand support for multiple languages, browsers, and platforms in the near future. All developers using its MapKit JS tool can link out to Maps on the web. The website version lets users do almost everything that they did on the app, including view guides, order food directly from Maps, explore cities, and get information about businesses.
Over the last decade, Apple has gradually added new features to attract more users, including details city maps, multi-stop routing, cycling directions, offline access, and EV routing. With time, Apple will also add new features like Look Around in the coming months.
Previously, developers helped Apple Maps reach web browsers through APIs for websites like DuckDuckGo. Now, the official link is all one needs to gain access to Apple Maps and almost every feature it offers in the app. The currently released version is beta and can be accessed by visiting beta.maps.apple.com.
This website is functional only for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Windows Chrome users. Apple has sidelined the general Chrome browser, which would allow all Android users to access the exclusive offering. Contrary to Apple’s approach, the navigation market is evolving into an open-source community with new Startups joining the race. The Overture Maps Foundation, which is backed by Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft recently made its first mapping dataset publicly accessible for developers to freely use the information to build their apps. So now, the game is not limited to Apple Maps vs Google Maps, but among other players as well.
