Introducing MapKit JS | Hacker News Reader

Introducing MapKit JS

developer.apple.com

109 pointskiyanwang46 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17232169.

This is beta.

250,000 map initializations 25,000 service requests

Per day. Correct me (it is quite late here) if I'm wrong but isn't this x10 the Google maps free tier?

No pricing information beyond this so far, they just suggest you contact them if you want more. They're probably still deciding.

Edit: I think Apple are specifically releasing it now because this week was the week the new Google Maps Platform (https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/) pay as you go pricing kicks in, the deadline has been pushed back by a month.

Under the new pricing you get $200 worth of credits as a monthly free tier which approximately maps (har har) to what this Apple beta gives you a day.

> I think Apple are specifically releasing it now because […]

This presentation is from WWDC 2018. The timing strikes me more as coincidence.

I'm skeptical on beta limits particularly when they haven't made pricing clear yet. Anectodally it's a typical marketing tactic to build hype. Expecting that it's temporary, rates will be throttled, and proper pricing tiers will kick in.

I hope it will affect Google's pricing, so I don't have to rewrite everything.

Rewrite these things under an abstraction layer so that you don't have to worry about third parties anymore

Google maps api tos forbids third party abstractions.

Seems like a great reason to not rely on Google Maps (forced lock in).

Do you need a paid Apple developer account for this too? I don't like to give my credit card details just to use the free limits.

For anyone looking to start using this, I would highly recommend waiting until https://leafletjs.com adds support so you aren't writing MapKit specific code.

I wonder if the official MapKit one uses vector rendering? It looks like all leaflet can do is display pretendered tiles.

EDIT: Oooh, https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-leaflet

Here’s a remixable example app for anyone wanting to quickly tinker with MapKit: https://glitch.com/~bagel-finder

Anyone know what the licensing terms are for data returned by these Apple services - in particular, are there any restrictions on what you can do with latitude/longitude data returned by their geocoding API (or place names and addresses from their reverse geocoder)?

Would like to know this as well as possibly map/tile download/caching for offline

Just saw an Apple Maps camera car in SF a week ago. First one I've seen. So they are at least doing a tiny bit of their own data gathering.

They also opened a 4,500 job facility in Hyderabad in 2016. [1] Presumably to do human editing like google maps does [2].

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-to-open-first-offshore-t...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-g...

And one in St. Louis, first I’ve noticed here. Haven’t seen a Google van in a couple years.

Do they have a request limit? Is using it setting some crazy tracking cookies that make it more difficult to achieve GDPR compliance? I like the support for pinch to zoom etc. Google Maps on the web not supporting it ruined so many website visits for me.

I assume they associate the server request with a token/app key. No need to set cookies just to keep count etc.

250,000 map initializations 25,000 service requests per day.

Per website or per developer account, that is the question, because one developer can have several sites using maps.

Some answers to questions I had

Uses WebGL with fall back to server side rendering with tiles, they call it "adaptive rendering modes".

What for? "Unify on a single map provider with familiar, flexible APIs" (from WWDC slides).

  Free tiers
  ----------

  Mapbox
    web
    50K map views / mo
    50K geocode / mo
    50K directions / mo
    50K matrix / mo

    mobile
    50K monthly active users
    same requests


  Apple
    web and mobile
    250K map views / *day*
    25K service requests / *day*


  Google (new style $200 credit system)
    (this is too complicated)

    web
    $200 free credit buys one of:
    14K map views embed advanced, might be anything with search/directions/routing, including on mobile / month 
    100K map views static on web / month
    28k map views dynamic on web / month (this hurts)    
     
    mobile
    unlimited mobile map views (very simple kind)
    14K map views for anything interesting / month
    40K direction requests / month
    ~10K Places calls / month

That's the max for any one service if you only use that service. So you could use 20K direction requests and 14K dynamic map views for free per month.

Google Maps gets expensive quickly, 71K embedded advanced map views per month is $1000 per month.

  roughly
  Google Maps: very expensive 
  Mapbox: moderately priced
  Apple Maps: very cheap

Licensing...

Google is restrictive. Can't be behind a login, can't track vehicles/assets, can't embed in a web view on desktop, in practice can often not embed in an app on iOS.

Mapbox is famously open, you can do all the above.

Apple seems like they might be more like Mapbox, given their goals, but can't find any licensing yet.

If the licensing turns out well, this could very nice for cross platform maps.

I don't know about Apple maps, but Mapbox's address geocoding is pretty useless for smaller countries, e.g. in Eastern Europe, while Google can provide excellent geocoding for addresses there too. It's a shame they will switch to this very expensive pricing, making it useless for smaller sites which can't afford it.

Last I checked the new Google Maps licensing [1] is a bit more permissive, placing no restrictions on the behind a login bit.

The Google Maps JavaScript API does support UIWebView [2] so it should work embedded on iOS. There's a native SDK too.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms/ [2] https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...

This is great for a few reasons. There are many annoying user-interface "issues" in the Google Maps JS, especially on mobile. For example on mobile devices, my wife goes absolutely insane when she's prompted to use TWO fingers instead of one to scroll around. I know it's an easy fix for google, but they're probably trying to adhere to some stupid material design standard.

Second, Google already has too much data on people. I think it's been said before, but Apple doesn't really track people as invasively as Google.

Third, as stated, there has desperately been a need for competition in this space. I hope that over time they introduce many of the other features that Google provides to make sure it's totally competitive.

Leaflet, esri are pretty great

Its annoying to me that they basically are just copying the interface that google maps SDK has. I would have hoped for something more declarative and easier to use from a framework like react/vue/elm etc.

Exactly. Google Maps is already painful to use with modern workflows. I can see how the similar API can be helpful for those who just want to switch to Apple Maps.

Have you trie Bing maps sdk? We wound up ditching it and using leaflet to render the imagery from Bing instead. It was the worst.

They actually modelled it on the Swift/Objective-C MapKit interface. (They mentioned this in the WWDC session)

Which doesn’t make any sense - this is for the web - not a native app

Sure it does. Likely the same developers would be implementing it on the web so makes sense to keep the api the same.

While it may be easier that way for the developers, it makes sense to make the API more idiotmatic for the target platform/SDK.

The worst thing you can do when designing an API is to make that API different on the various platforms you support.

Edit: That’s not to say you shouldn’t strive for the most natural and easy interface for devs to use, but even if you’re not there yet, keep things consistent on all platforms.

Don't see any info on the pricing.

You need a developer account - US$99 per annum for an individual.

Competition in the maps space is severally needed right now with the closure of smaller services over the past few years, the amount of data Apple has and CAN expose will make it a real contender, compared to smaller Map data services that don't availability of always-on real time data.

Popular times in Google Maps is incredibly useful but request to open this are ignored. I hope with Apple competing, both make this data available.

I would consider this in my next project, it would be nice to see pricing.

Would it be possible for OSM to provide these services at cost to fund their operations?

At some point we need to stop reinventing the wheel at each org and work on contrivuint g collectively for common shared Internet resources (just like Wikipedia).

OSM and others have limited availability of real time data, the smaller services leverage data from prediction models and some even get data upstream from Google through third parties.

Every Google Android device is by default a real time tracking device. The usefulness of this data is immensely underrated.

The only way I think real competition can be established here is exactly with news like this.

> Would it be possible for OSM to provide these services at cost to fund their operations?

"Real time data" means things like "current traffic data", right? That takes a lot of data collectors, and the data gets stale quickly. This sort of thing isn't on the radar for lots in the OSM community, I don't even know how OSM'd start trying to provide that...

Table stakes for a mapping provider. Good to see Apple moving this to the web as well. Hopefully future updates will provide discerning features.

by avoiding Openstreetmap entirely, Apple makes a statement of Ivory Tower. No idea how map data is ingested internally, but I see no indications of OSM data

They do not avoid OpenStreetMap entirely. They use OSM (and about 300 other sources). On a map, click on the "legal" link, then click through the "more" link to see the list.

Generally speaking, though, they use TomTom wherever possible.

I'm curious how they use OSM. If they mix the OSM data with other data, then OSM's GPL-like 'share alike' licence clause kicks in....

> They use OSM (and about 300 other sources). On a map, click on the "legal" link, then click through the "more" link to see the list.

If you don't merge OSM data, then you only need to attribute OSM. And I don't think this is sufficient for the licence, which says: "You must include a notice ... reasonably calculated to make any Person that is exposed to the Work aware that Content was obtained from [OSM]". i.e. basically every map has to say "OSM"

Wouldn't you just use something from Google? They have better mapping data, at least or so I thought...

Depends on region. In my city Google maps are terrible. Apple maps are even worse, though. But I can imagine that they might be better somewhere.

If you are wondering what can these maps be used for, I thought I would post this. We want to have ways for people to stay in our app so we can do geolocation while they are driving. The web doesn’t support background geolocation callbacks.

Here is a web based demo we have of a person picking up their friends while driving on the way to an event:

https://youtu.be/i4nQZ-WN3Uw

A lot goes into it including distance and heading calculations, correct 3d transforms for the map and avatars, as well as the usual realtime/offline infrastructure of Qbix Platform on the backend.

It is part of our larger Groups app that we are rolling out later this year that lets users organize group activities and even drive each other to them.

So now this comes at a great time - we are happy to offer a choice of two maps providers instead of just one, soon.

We release the Platform under AGPL on github.com/Qbix and many reusable components as MIT license there. You can see more here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

Edit: Why so many downvotes? Seems strange.

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