Apple Maps on the web launches in beta | Hacker News Reader

Apple Maps on the web launches in beta

apple.com

465 pointsingve533 comments

Launching a web app that doesn't work on the web? I guess that's what we should expect from a company that makes a messaging app that magically only works on one piece of hardware. Apple has a knack for finding restrictions where they would otherwise never exist.

Assuming you're referring to the fact that it doesn't work on all browsers, it's literally a beta.

It clearly states that it's for Chrome/Edge/Safari only, and not for mobile. But it also says at the bottom:

> Support for additional languages, browsers, and platforms will be expanded over time.

I think it's totally fair that a beta has support for limited browsers, in order to get it out faster. Just like it's only in English for now as well, although that will obviously expand too.

If it's not available for Firefox or Android when it leaves beta, then yes it's a problem. But an English-only beta with limited compatibility is one of the things betas are for. It's an appropriate setting of expectations.

Not super impressed. It has the same problem as Google in that street names are displayed much too sparsely, making it hard to orient yourself. Additionally, the satellite view is too dark, at least in my area.

The imagery looks clean but the minimum altitude is much higher than what Google offers, so it's hard to evaluate. (Helpful tip to mapping providers: you don't need more resolution, just let me zoom in on your existing imagery! There is no reason whatsoever to stop at 1:1.)

No street-view functionality appears to be present. Not sure if it's supposed to be, but it's certainly a dealbreaker if not.

And then, yes, there's the matter of failing to support commonly-used browsers, even though it works fine in those browsers when appending a bogus subdirectory name as someone else pointed out.

Bottom line, if there's any reason to use this over Google Maps I'm not seeing it.

Amusingly does not work for safari on iPhone. Ok ok I have the maps app and that’s what they want me to use but if I am on mobile now and I want to click to check it out right now… well, maybe I won’t come back to try it later, guys??

Feels a little like they rushed it to meet some Q3 launch timeline?

+1; does not load for me using Firefox on MacOS.

It seems to work for me. Can you elaborate on the problem you're seeing?

> Apple has a knack for finding restrictions where they would otherwise never exist.

And there are plenty of apologists ready to explain how it's your fault.

What browser? Works in safari and Chrome (latest and latest) on macos. Genuinely curious what isn't working as that seems like a real mistake.

I just tried it on Firefox with https://beta.maps.apple.com/abc, and all the POIs are incorrectly placed (at least in South Africa) and the roads are right-angled and un-named.

Also, Apple makes an absolute mess when contributing to the OpenStreetMap project. For example, their contributors make any informal / illegal shortcut part of a residential street when it isn't.

Firefox is not currently a supported browser.

Links like https://beta.maps.apple.com/abc still work.

Works for me on FF dev edition. I bet WebGPU support is required (mainline FF does not support this).

Use an extension to change your useragent string; it mostly works on firefox, just expect bugs.

> Also, Apple makes an absolute mess when contributing to the OpenStreetMap project. For example, their contributors make any informal / illegal shortcut part of a residential street when it isn't.

This would be very bad, where are you getting this from? That their own maps implementation doesn't work outside of Chrome/Safari doesn't sound nearly as bad as if they're damaging an entire ecosystem like that.

I contribute to OSM, and I've seen it in my own local town. It's not so much nefarious as it is negligent. They don't have local knowledge, see a satellite image of what seems like a road and decide it connects to existing residential roads. If you spend time on it, you'll notice it too as it was common enough for me to notice it.

Firefox on Ubuntu works on my machine, but only using your link, and it displays "[App.AppleMaps.Title]" as the tabs title. The POIs seem to be correct in Switzerland.

Despite preferring Apple's ecosystem over all others, I've built up quite a robust collection of "Favorites" and "Want to Go" and 'Starred" places in Google Maps, which makes the switching costs to move to Apple Maps high.

Is there a way to export that data from Google Maps? Will Apple offer an import feature?

I accumulated 8,000+ visited locations on Google Maps, but they've been increasingly abandoning "power users". You might want to reconsider before "investing" or being emotionally attached to Google Maps's saved lists:

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMaps/comments/1cfqk52/did_i_j...

[2] https://techissuestoday.com/google-maps-limits-entries-into-...

From that reddit thread:

Sharing some perspective on this (I was involved in the fix).

Basically what started happening at some point was that Maps had built in a “timeout” for the fetch of Saved lists. When the lists weren’t able to be downloaded/fetched in under X seconds, the system stopped trying, assuming that lists in general would always load in under X seconds.

For users with huge lists, and for some users with very slow connections, it would timeout and not show anything. The way to notice it was typically when sharing the list, because the receiving user would fall into that timeout trap. The owner of the list usually didn’t notice immediately because the places were cached on their devices.

It’s still being worked on, and being rolled out slowly.. Some changes will come though, not sure how it’ll be announced.

Only through Google Takeout. I am trying to build a tool that allows displaying and sharing them outside of Google Accounts or Maps, but the only reliable way to get them out is unfortunately still Takeout. Some browser extensions offered a loop/extraction but they mostly don’t work anymore I think.

The Takeout export from Maps is quite messy when I've done it in the past.

Google Takeout is excellent; basically GDPR data downloads 5 years before GDPR was even a thing. Before moving anything to Apple Maps I'd want to be sure they offer a similar feature so I'm not locked in.

You can use Browserflow (Chrome extension for browser automation) to extract saved lists from Google Maps: https://browserflow.app/shared/MWz0bTt7zBkyRMTs

Screen recording: https://www.loom.com/share/5ad91e0347294c7a9b4f0e0b3b2b8544?...

I made Browserflow so feel free to ask any questions / let me know if you run into any issues.

Collectively there are 100s of strings open across Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc asking for a clean way to export saved places on Google Maps, but other than Takeout (which for the average user is quite complex), there isn't really anything that works well.

There's ways to hack together a scraper that can go through and grab everything, but it's still quite messy. I think Google is making it hard on purpose in order to use this as their "moat".

I use Apple Maps for all of my transit needs, but I still keep Google for business data and lists like this. I don't find the Apple Maps list set-up to be what I want from this kind of feature. I do find it reasonable to keep two maps apps on my home screen, though.

If you use your mapping app to curate locations, just don’t bother with Apple Maps. It’s pretty great for navigation and turn by turn and offline. But its review ecosystem is Yelp and TripArvisor (so terrible) instead of GM’s great user reviews, you cannot collaborate on collections of locations, managing saved locations works terrible.

I love Apple Maps and use it every day in NYC. Hope they will make it require a slightly longer press to drop a pin. I can't be the only user accidentally doing this ~a dozen times a week. Happened just now in the browser, trying to drag the view. Rooting for the product.

Their current browser experience doesn't include transit or cycling, which makes it not terribly useful for NYC.

Is a map without transit even a map? I still use Google Maps as my default for transit, but Citymapper is considerably more reliable and I've been trying to remember to use it more.

Even the app doesn't support cycling directions in many cities, such as the capital of New Zealand.

The desktop and iOS apps (and integration of e.g Doordash with the Maps API) are great

After the initial gaffes, I was reluctant to use it and stayed with Google Maps for a long time. But a couple years ago someone mentioned it had improved, and I'd already been trying to gain some distance from Google... and it's pretty usable. I'll just remember to be a little skeptical if it tells me to drive across the Australian desert.

I wish I was even half as happy about DDG though.

could try kagi maybe? i’ve liked it

I want to love it due to the integration in the ecosystem Im invested in. However, for petes sake, I still can’t use it in my country?!

The map shows all roads and some POIs, however it always shows me the warning that I can’t ger directions in this location.

Seems like a pretty trivial feature to make that available across the globe before other updates.

Yeah and the process to remove a pin is a little clunky I find

And the process to add them is a bit too "streamlined".

How do you remove them?

Out of curiosity, I removed "beta." part and see how it goes (using Chrome + Windows).

So apparently, any URL with a query parameter (e.g. https://maps.apple.com/?ll=41.77708546284588%2C-122.51487365... ) will redirect you to ... their competitor, https://www.google.com/maps . I have no idea why.

> will redirect you to ... their competitor

For me, it triggered the opening of the (Apple) Maps.app desktop application. Which makes a lot more sense. On safari and chrome.

Also does that on Firefox on macOS

Yes, that is the production behavior.

If you have a link to maps.apple.com on a platform with app links (or claimed HTTPS URLs on android platforms), a native Apple Maps app can display the results. Otherwise, they haven't had a web version, so they would change it to a redirect to Google Maps.

I can't speak as to whether Chrome or Firefox on Mac, or alternate browsers on iOS, support this OS feature to launch native apps which have claimed a URL path.

The defacto query parameters from Google Maps (at least historically) are supported by Apple Maps as well.

This made migration to Apple Maps easy when it launched - you can just change the domain in the URL and prefer the native experience, knowing it will fall back to Google Maps in other cases.

Once Apple's web experience is finished, I imagine they will stop redirecting to Google Maps. Google has somewhat compromised the privacy posture of Google Maps, which may very well be how Apple internally justified building a web experience.

I checked with curl and no matter the user agent it will answer with a 302 to google maps, I don't know how it works that others say it will redirect them to the Apple Maps App.

That is not what https://httpstatus.io/ sees

With no query param it redirects to Apple sites. With query param, "Invalid protocol: maps:"

I'm guessing that's Chrome going to Google maps site. I recall a setting being there to disable this.

Based on other comments, it's more likely due to being on Windows.

$ curl -v "https://maps.apple.com/?ll=41.77708546284588%2C-122.51487365..."

....

    < HTTP/2 302 
    < server: AkamaiGHost
    < content-length: 0
    < location: https://maps.google.com/?ll=41.77708546284588%2C-122.51487365132222&spn=0.04999999999999005%2C0.11502863436983546
    < expires: Thu, 25 Jul 2024 18:58:00 GMT
    < cache-control: max-age=0, no-cache, no-store

That's on my linux laptop, but I'm in the UK, I suspect geo and akami makes a difference

On my Mac, that (first) link takes me straight to the Apple Maps app.

no, it takes you to whatever defaults to your maps

No, my default app for maps is built-in app, Maps.

That's crazy!

On one hand, this is a beta product, so perhaps understandable that they're not supporting all platforms out of the gate.

On the other hand, if you're serious about getting your application tested, people running open source browsers and operating systems are going to provide the most thorough testing and detailed problem reports.

Why would I want to be bombarded with problem reports on items that I could find myself once I add it to my testing matrix? Beta testing is to suss out bugs that my internal testers haven’t caught.

People are so use to Google’s bastardizing the term “beta” that they forgot what beta testing traditionally is

Even for a beta this is clunky and practically unusable compared to Google Maps. It's pretty obvious that Apple still has a very long way to go to offer a competitive maps product. Google is just so far ahead of whatever this beta is.

For example, I centered the map on my location in Los Angeles, CA and then clicked search for "Gas Stations", and it promptly reposition the map and gave me all the gas stations in San Jose, CA, a city hundreds of miles away. WTF? This is probably one of the most common use cases and they can't get it right.

I managed to drop a pin somehow, not sure, and now I can't remove it and the map is stuck focusing on this random pin point. I don't see any UI for removing the dropped pin. I can't move the pin, or do anything to change where the pin is. Ugh.

that's weird, searching for gas stations worked fine for the developers in Cupertino

> For example, I centered the map on my location in Los Angeles, CA and then clicked search for "Gas Stations", and it promptly reposition the map and gave me all the gas stations in San Jose, CA, a city hundreds of miles away. WTF?

I'm not seeing that behavior at all. When I type gas stations in search, it adds a 'nearby'. It will slightly reposition the window if there are matches on the edges, and the search goes into the history with the closest local area (e.g. the suburb I'm centered over).

It is an active beta though, so I suppose it could differ browser by browser, day by day.

>For example, I centered the map on my location in Los Angeles, CA and then clicked search for "Gas Stations", and it promptly reposition the map and gave me all the gas stations in San Jose, CA, a city hundreds of miles away. WTF? This is probably one of the most common use cases and they can't get it right.

This happens all the time in the official iOS app. If you search for a local restaurant that's not in their database, they send you to the closest sounding one even if its on the other side of the planet.

I know people are complaining about lack of Firefox support, but the page also blocks Apple’s own Safari browser on the latest iOS 18 beta.

So I think it’s more likely it’s just beta bugs (site not OS) and reducing their support matrix down during that time.

It’s not just their beta iOS, I tried on 17.5.1 and I also get an unsupported browser error.

Agree! The current limitations are more related to beta bugs and development constraints rather than deliberate exclusion of specific browsers.

Very sad Firefox is not supported from day one, even in beta

if you go to something like https://beta.maps.apple.com/asd you bypass the browser check.

works on firefox, but it's a big sluggish.

It works for a second, then I get redirected to the unsupported page.

This doesn't work for Brave.

In my mobile Safari it doesn’t work either.

Edit: looks like iphone is not supported yet, https://support.apple.com/en-gb/120585

Agreed, but it was even more disappointing to also see the "unsupported browser" when I tried it in Safari.

Firefox isn't a supported browser. Android isn't supported at all. I'm not even sure how you manage to find yourself in a situation where that can even happen.

> Firefox isn't a supported browser.

If you swap useragents it is.

Seems there's a few bugs around (mostly visual so far) but it's usable.

> If you swap useragents it is.

"Supported" implies "they don't block it for being unsupported".

because it is an early beta?

It's not as though they're doing anything that you can't get from open street maps, mapbox, Google, Amazon, or any of the numerous NPM packages which do maps. It's not 2005, having so many compat bugs is just embarrassing.

Are you genuinely confused that Apple didn’t prioritize support on Android and on #3 (4?) browser? Or are you just disappointed, but expressing it as bewildernent?

I'm saying that in the year of our lord 2024 (with arguably the best browser compatibility we've ever had) they managed to—against all odds—build a website which doesn't work on the most popular mobile operating system in the world and the second most popular rendering engine in the world.

“Not prioritizing support” is a nice euphemism for explicitly blocking it. They could have just left it alone or added a dismissible banner saying “this browser isn’t supported, don’t report any bugs you find, we don’t care”, but they went out of their way to prevent you from accessing it.

Competent web development has usually been associated with standards compliant sites that work everywhere.

In 2024 its weird that someone who isn't a moron manages to break the web. One would assume this is deliberate to retain some competitive edge. If so why bother a map product that doesn't work where I need it 99% of the time is completely useless. They might as well have retained more advantage yet by making it mac safari only.

I never understood the value proposition of Apple Maps. Can you imagine being the executive, deciding to create Apple Maps? "Ok, how much does it cost to build and maintain? $BIG NUMBER. What? No way. We'll never make it back by selling adverts on the map." And, still, they built it. We have heard many times on HN that Google Maps (virtually) throws money out the window to keep it running so smoothly. Just keeping all the transit info correct for suggesting routes must be a nightmare.

Maps is table stakes for a smartphone, and having such a key feature provided by your main competitor is a huge risk. So purely on that basis, it could be worth it.

Then, on top of that, there is value in the data you're able to collect. Traffic data is really valuable. Tracking the movement of vehicles and pedestrians lets you create very accurate maps based on "real world" data, you could use it to figure out really specific things like traffic light timings, diversions, pedestrian crossings, parking space, layout of private roads...

At one point, Apple was working on a car, if you were making a self driving car, all that data would be useful for you, and beacuse of the value of it, competitors may not even sell it to you. So your only option is to generate it yourself.

As for transit data, that is fairly simple, most transit agencies will publish their timetables in GTFS format, there are tools to automatically export this in scheduling software. That will probably get your 90% of the way there, so you might have a few on the groud people in major cities to tweak and make it more accurate, which is nothing for a company on the scale of Apple.

The Maps application on iOS used to use Google Maps. But then Google started to collect too much user data and withholding features like turn-by-turn navigation (while making it available on Android).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maps#Initial_release

Becoming independent from Google for such a core feature was an important move.

Because it's like one of the most important app on your phone ?

How many people would still buy an iPhone without Apple or Google maps ?

It's defensive, (and it was built at a time when money was free).

The iPhone launched with Google Maps. Then Google decided to push feature updates skewed towards android phones, leaving iPhone users behind. Apple saw that a vendor could screw their users over (and potentially cause defectors), and decided to invest to ensure they don't have a dependancy.

The best part is that they can now offer it to App Store developers as a free iOS SDK (and paid API on web). Meanwhile the same developers would have to pay an exorbitant cost to use Google Maps. It's part of the moat that makes iOS the more profitable platform to develop for. You can also see this playbook with the release of free Weather APIs.

Yea Apple/Google maps has to be expensive to build and maintain, but at least for apple, they were able to buy their way to bootstrapping the map. What's impressed me is all the fly-over and custom 3D modeling they've done. It does really feel like they just wanted to make a good map at some point, even beyond what people needed or expected. That said, mapping products probably has good caching and fault tolerance you can design in to reduce cost - maps don't go out of sync that fast (for caching) and you'd never know if their "suggested routes" data was out of date occasionally, because you can never drive both routes at once.

At the time Apple Maps came out, Google Maps on iOS was limited to bitmap tiles and had no turn by turn directions, whereas Google Maps on Android had both dynamic vector based maps and turn by turn directions.

Apple Maps forced Google to improve Google Maps on iOS.

Apple Maps data was definitely substandard when it was released, but it has improved considerably since then. I vastly prefer it to Google Maps, especially for turn by turn directions when I'm driving.

Privacy and a vastly better navigation experience is what makes me prefer Apple Maps for turn by turn nav. For finding local businesses Google Maps is better

I'm guessing they want to give people an advert-free experience for such a basic function as finding directions and driving a route:

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-maps-pop-up-ad-34581...

> I never understood the value proposition of Apple Maps.

They ship their operating systems with all the "common" apps pre-installed (e.g.: Email, Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Maps, etc). For the maps to work, they need some data source. That's what Apple Maps is.

Apple doesn't make money with the Email app directly, but its existence likely improves how users perceive iOS. This probably translates to return customers and more people recommending it.

I guess it gives them leverage vis a vis Google?

I like that it tells me what lane to be in, so it's my main mapping app. Also presumably better privacy than Google Maps.

Maps are core technology, which Apple prefers to own. Imagine wanting to release CarPlay (or a full blown car) and Google having you by the balls over maps and navigation. That wouldn't be a good situation. As to $BIG_NUMBER, they seem to be managing fine - Maps sucked pretty bad when it came out, but it doesn't suck now, I prefer it to Google Maps where I live.

Whilst I agree with what you say I'm so grateful for Apple Maps simply on the grounds that I try and use Google products as little as possible. Things like Apple Maps keep me in the Apple ecosystem as they add value to my life. I wouldn't use Apple CarPlay either if I had to use Google Maps (granted, I know Waze and others also exist).

Google Maps on iOS works terribly where I am. Current and previous phone. Going through the Caldecott tunnel would fast forward all the stops. Switched to Apple Maps and I’ve been very happy. Just a single glitch noticed (a light appears before a freeway onramp).

Because you never want to be held hostage to a third party vendor for core technology.

The entire reason that Apple Mapd was introduced a year early was that Google held back turn by turn directions on the iOS version of Google maps

Not being dependent on Google for such a core feature in their phones makes it worth it for Apple.

Apple's income doesn't come from adverts, it comes from selling iPhones

One of the selling points of Apple devices is that their software is [1] just _nice_ to use, letting you do what you need to do, without having to keep you in and monetize you otherwise.

Is Mail.app the most powerful client on earth? No; but it is Good Enough, and I don't have to download and pay for a third party app. Is Weather.app the best weather app with all the bells and whistles possible? No; but I don't care about weather apps to download and trial fifteen other ones and It Just Works.

Maps are (orders of magnitude) more complicated; but arguably are also on the baseline level of functionality for a modern mobile OS.

And Maps.app is just so much _nicer_ to use than Google Maps. It has the same problems that all Apple products like it does (search is atrocious, POI db is bad); but it is just a much more pleasant product. It looks nicer, it _feels_ nicer, it has best-in-class transit directions, and doesn't shove ads in front of my face.

[1]: Arguably getting worse and worse at it every year; but still miles ahead of everyone else.

Your not being serious? It's a core app, and the amount of data they get out of it, makes it worth it.

Google Maps had a total monopoly and Google could have leveraged that in the competition between Android and iOS. Maybe they even tried asking Apple for a lot of money to be able to use it on iOS.

It takes years, even a decade to get maps to a good quality (Apple maps launched in 2012). So I think it's a good thing that Apple started early enough. I'm sure it's crazy expensive to build and maintain. Apple can fund it from iPhone sales, and ensure that their ecosystem has an alternative for Google maps.

I don't think it's meant to turn a profit, I think it's meant as protection of their iPhone revenue.

It has no public transit support? or did I miss a button? I mean it's one of the only use I have for a desktop map, plan your route ahead, see where to go, and how to go there.

Why are mapping services so stingy with custom lists of pinned location? This announcement from Apple made me excited because Google Map's saved list has become unusable for me. I have 8,000+ favorites (used to mark places I've visited) on Google Maps and behavior above 500 is undefined. On Mobile, Google Maps loads an arbitrary list of 3,000 pins. Unfortunately, Apple is even worst with a limit of 100 [2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMaps/comments/1cfqk52/did_i_j...

[2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/103188

Try https://maps.here.com

You can put items in guides, i'm not sure the limit of items you can put in a guide or how many guides though

Don't know what I was expecting, but Apple Maps seems to be as noisy as Google Maps, maybe event more. So many businesses listed, some with long names taking 5 lines. Good thing this is "not supported" on Firefox, I might've found even more issues.

For all of these companies lipservice to A.I., mapping still requires a high degree of human involvement to normalize.

That’s the best feature of Apple Maps. Google hides a ton of businesses, even at max zoom.

I would really love to see a "maps" app that focuses specifically on local discovery for businesses and other points of interest. Or, one that at least makes a real attempt to deliniate between getting you to a known place, and finding you new places to go.

Most mapping apps seem to blend navigation & discovery into a single experience that winds up being worse at both.

Apple Maps on the Web Works via DDG

>DuckDuckGo Taps Apple Maps to Power Private Search Results

>Try it out with one of the many different ways you can search for places on DuckDuckGo:

Search for an address

Search for a geographical place

Search for a local business

Search for a type of business

Search for places nearby

>At DuckDuckGo, we believe getting the privacy you deserve online should be as simple as closing the blinds. Naturally, our strict privacy policy of not collecting or sharing any personal information extends to this integration. We do not send any personally identifiable information such as IP address to Apple or other third parties. For local searches, where your approximate location information is sent by your browser to us, we discard it immediately after use. You are still anonymous when you perform map and address-related searches on DuckDuckGo. You can read more about our anonymous localized results here.

>https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-apple-mapkit-js/

Kago also uses Apple Maps, in much the same manner.

I much prefer Apple maps over google when I'm driving. Nice to see this. Shame I had to use a user-agent switcher though.

Why is that? Having Google's ability to navigate with live traffic data isn't a valuable feature to you? Apple's traffic-flow is mostly a joke to me, and I've never seen anyone trust it.

Sadly the best feature of Apple Maps, the excellent transit overlay, doesn't seem to be available on this web version yet.

I noticed this too and I am afraid they wont ever release this on the web app since they seem to have the best lane and road mapping data.

Google Maps also transit overlay. Is it measurably worse that Apple Maps? It seems fine to me.

> Your current browser isn't supported

From the "Supported Browsers" section, they only seem to support macOS and Windows. Somehow I suspect that this is overzealous User-Agent sniffing.

First problem: the searchbox does not get focus upon opening. Looking for a place is the main thing you do. Why does it require mouse handling and handling at all?

No keyboard response to Escape. It's basically the maps widget with a user unfriendly, but nice looking, drawer

Same with the Contacts app on macos, it's slow, crashes, and I doubt anyone uses it

Contacts app: it's fine, doesn't crash for me, and I use it. So there go your assumptions about its entire userbase.

Wait, what? Do you enter all your email addresses by hand in your mail app? How do you add new addresses?

I’ve been using Google Maps forever. When Apple Maps came out, I experimented with it a bit, even tried using it as a default, and it was terrible. Several locations it couldn’t find, or just was in the completely wrong location. Even businesses were missing.

Every now and then I try it out, and it will seem improved a bit over the previous time, but it won’t take long before I run into an address that is again missing or incorrect.

After a while, I gave up on it altogether. But sometimes on CarPlay, I will accidentally end up on Apple Maps, and will realize it after it either has me going in the wrong direction, or it can’t find the place I’m going.

Even my last trip a couple weeks ago this happened.

I’m surprised it has the usage it does, because still to this day, I — admittedly anecdotally — still have issues with the data.

I think maybe in larger cities it functions better. But outside of large cities, I think the data is still quite a bit behind Google Maps.

Your last line is right, it's definitely a location thing. I've been using Apple Maps for years in the various big cities I've lived and I strongly prefer it over Google Maps, but whenever I'm on vacation I'll switch to Google.

I live about a dozen miles from the Googleplex in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Apple Maps has roads all around me that do not exist: at best jeep trails but mostly logging roads from 150 years ago that are nothing but forest today, barely hiking trails at this point. Apple Maps is a joke outside of major cities and has been since its debut.

I switched to Apple Maps a couple of years ago. I live in Seattle and haven't had any problems with it.

Also, if you didn't know, you can delete Apple Maps entirely if you dislike it. iOS definitely tries hard to enforce those default apps.

I opened it up and was a little surprised by what it showed in my surrounding area. It was filled with restaurants and businesses that haven't existed for years. There must be thousands or even tens of thousands of apple maps users that live in the area that see those places in the app every day. I wonder how often they try to visit one of those places. Perhaps they have a habit of searching on google (or google maps I suppose) to verify that it exists before they go to a new place? Very interesting.

I used to be extremely loyal to google maps but they simply haven't added any notable features in more than a decade. They still end the route automatically "at destination", even if you missed your turn and now are driving miles past your destination, which made me frustrated enough one day to dump it and never look back.

Apple maps does something similar but they enter "parking mode" rather than just summarily ending navigation. A little change but a huge difference in usability.

If you put something random after the URL it seems to skip the browser checks: https://beta.maps.apple.com/bleh

True! That's quite funny and shows how utterly pointless browser restrictions are.

They seem to have fixed that now. At least on Firefox on Android

Nope, still blocks my iPhone/Safari.

I want to use Apple Maps. In a few areas I find they beat google. Airport Maps, Transit.

But Google has deep integrations with a lot of things that just make it nice to use. For example, Apple Maps has bike directions. Google maps has bike directions that integration directly with the local bikeshare. So you can an ETA that includes walking time to/from the bikeshare stations for picking up and dropping off bikes.

Right now Google Maps is at the "It just works" phase and Apple is not there, though they are improving quite a bit.

I live downtown in a busy neighborhood and Google has a "How busy is it right now?" thing, as inaccurate as it potentially is, is super helpful so I don't walk over to a bar/restaurant and find out its packed to the brim with people singing Titanic over karaeoke.

> Your current browser isn't supported

Supported on your Windows PC: Edge Chrome

Same for me, and I am using an iPhone X with Safari

The way I see it--and I mean this in a non-pejorative way--Apple as a company has autism. Google has ADHD.

Apple Maps launched in 2012. That's 12 years that Apple has been plugging away at this. I think we've seen just how much effort is required to catch up to Google Maps. Google actually does a ton to clean up and integrate data from different sources. It adds up.

Apple sticks with things they start for the most part (Ping anyone?). Apple Pay is the poster child for this. Every week there's an announcement where some bank in Estonia has been added. They've slowly built out an ecosystem.

That's what I mean by autism.

Google OTOH has ADHD. If something doesn't immediately work, they lose interest and it gets cancelled. They've reached a point where doing anything requires commitment.

Most of Google's successful products are acquisitions. Android, Maps, Docs, Youtube are obvious examples. Exceptions include search (obviously), Chrome and Gmail.

There are areas where it's almost a joke how many variants of a product have existed and been shuttered over the years. Payments and messaging springs to mind.

Apparently Apple has decided that Maps is core to their business and they've stuck to it. I don't disagree. Good for them. Still, not supporting Firefox? Hopefully that's temporary.

Nice. With the current trajectory Apple Maps will be a serious competitor to Google Maps.

When it first came out we all made fun of it and it deserved that fun to be made. It was absolutely terrible.

Fast-forward to today: I live in Turkey, Google Maps' satellite view is extremely blurry at an unusable level, and Apple Maps displays satellite view perfectly at a nice resolution. There has been a change in street numbers about three years ago here. Apple Maps displays the current new street number while Google Maps still displays the old street number. And before you say Apple is only good at first-world metropolitans: I live in a small town in Turkey, barely more populated than a village in winter.

The only reason I keep Google Maps is compatibility especially when sending location etc to others with Android devices, otherwise I'd have long deleted it.

With this upgrade I might actually indeed delete Google Maps which has one of the worst UX I've seen (well, it's a Google product so that's expected) and very bad data, at least for all my practical purposes.

I've sometimes used Apple Maps on a desktop browser, with the URL https://maps.apple.com/imagecollection/map?path=anything (hold ctrl while scrolling to zoom)

I'm quite glad there's now official support.

Where do they source their data? I've contributed a lot of hyperspecific information to OpenStreetMap about my location that Google gets very wrong. It looks like Apple took some of it, slightly tweaked some stuff, and completed ignored other bits.

Apple mentions OpenStreetMap quite prominently: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/maps/legal-en....

Also, the "Legal" link on https://beta.maps.apple.com/ goes to https://gspe21-ssl.ls.apple.com/html/attribution.html which lists OpenStreetMap on the first line.

What’s an easy way to update OSM data on the go on a mobile device?

I just wish Apple Maps would drop Yelp .. I hate Yelp

What alternative do they have? Google Maps reviews?

- A lot of retail businesses listed in my neighborhood that don't exist. I am guessing they are pulling from corporate registries to find these?

- The directions feature is about 14 years behind Google/OSM. No transit, no cycling, and no traffic visualization.

What I miss the most from Apple Maps is their lack of user content (at least in Germany). While I can find many pictures and reviews of every tiny store on Google Maps, Apple usually only has a handful of reviews and almost no photos submitted.

There doesn't seem to be any reverse geocoding available. "Current location" puts me over 200 miles from where I am. You can't click anywhere on the map to get directions, you have to either click a location (already identified as such, with a name and icon) or type in an address. It's unclear that said locations are even clickable because the mouse icon doesn't change to a pointer. Directions are in miles only and I couldn't find an option to switch to metric; and they take a couple of seconds to be generated. No bike option. Many browsers aren't supported. (And of course no street view either).

It looks more alpha than beta.

Current Location has nothing to do with their implementation or reverse geocoding and the browser does the work.

I'm quite happy to see this, since a long time ago I worked with various mapping providers (back when telcos had their own map and driving apps). One of the folk I worked with went to Apple, and I suspect this is their work :)

Wow, after playing with it for a few minutes, I find it to actually be better than the horrible desktop version in Sonoma, where click-and-drag to move the map around inexplicably _drags place labels_ if you accidentally start the drag on one, and where clicking on a category search like "supermarkets - search nearby" always recenters around your current location instead of honoring your current map view.

Just give us airtags in icloud.com/find please, so that I can use them while having an android phone. I don't need apple maps in browser.

Why not just get a tile?

I’d use Apple Maps more frequently, but business data and reviews are just not very helpful compared to Google Maps (at least where I am).

Good, this is one of the last reasons I used google as a default search engine. Hope we see it as an alternative in other search engines.

With all this front-end elaborate architectural smartassery, supporting Firefox is too difficult. Was it developed in Berlin?

Doesn't duckduckgo already use Apple maps and work on Firefox?

https://duckduckgo.com/?iaxm=maps&q=washington+dc&bbox=-77.2...

The color scheme and styling they're using is one of the worst I've ever seen, even zoomed in a lot it's very hard to see roads clearly. And zoomed out enough to see 2 nearby towns all the roads aren't even shown, only a major highway.

Seems strange Apple offering this for free for other platform users.

This also makes me wonder how much does it cost to run a Map services. I assume the actual server and bandwidth cost are negligible. But the updating and Data would be the most expensive part. But what incentive does Apple have to open this up?

Protomaps makes hosting maps pretty cheap for open streetmap vector tiles. Most of the cost is actually the CDN bandwidth. It's not going to be nothing depending on the number of users but it shouldn't break the bank for Apple and probably is relatively low to other content they distribute (e.g. Apple TV) or OS updates.

The way protomaps does this is by serving a single large file with all the map data via bucket storage and then using lambda functions + CDNs to extract tiles from there on demand. So, they don't pre-calculate the tile files and this simplifies the update process to replacing a single file. The CDN caches the extracted tiles so this is relatively cheap and doable even for small startups. So, this minimizes compute and storage.

Generating the map tiles requires a bit of compute obviously but it's a constant overhead; and they have to do this anyway for their native apps.

Probably the hardest part for them was building a hardware accelerated render engine for the web. Similar to Maplibre, Google Maps, etc. That would explain why it doesn't work on Firefox as well. And obviously Safari is a bit lagging with things like web GPU and WASM that I imagine would be useful for this.

Apple's been kicking around the idea of adding ads to maps:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/08/21/apple-maps-could-...

Makes more sense if you consider that.

One probably small thing: Having a cohesive ecosystem where you can share links makes a map app more useful.

> But the updating and Data would be the most expensive part. But what incentive does Apple have to open this up?

Seems you already figured it out: Access to more data / updates. Hence the "Have a Business on Maps?" being a prominent feature.

I fear running all these services is expensive too - not just the data & updates.

You need quite a lot of infrastructure:

1. map tiles

2. satellite view

3. geocoding. Where you have several services like forward, reverse, IP2coord. Likely also different services for different countries.

4. A-B routing. Again with several services like car, bike, walking and transit. Especially transit is a completely different thing. Also traffic data requires a different data pipeline.

5. ratings / reviews

6. user data (when logged in) for preferences etc

I was also surprised to see that there is no cost for using Apple Maps (maybe because it's a beta?). How will this affect services like Google Maps, Mapbox, and similar providers?

A positive association with Apple would make me slightly more likely to switch to iPhone next upgrade cycle with frustrations with my Pixel.

well it's not like all of this is brand new, they are already updating the data for iphones ... ipads ... macs ... vision pros ...

Probably to try to get reviews. I would think that is Google Maps' biggest moat.

Interestingly, the web version uses newer satellite data than the app version, at least for some areas.

I live in a city in Canada, every 6 months I tend to give Apple Maps a try.

Inside of this year there have been multiple times where the Apple Maps route is 3x longer.

15 min vs 45 min

55 min vs 1 hr 25 min

I want to use Apple Maps, but don't let these comments from NYC, LA, etc make you think its close to par with Google Maps.

Because its not.

Is this due to it having inaccurate traffic estimates, or is it just picking bad routes independently of traffic?

This isn't even alpha: Vector simplifications look cruel, especially on vector tile edges, and my Macbook Pro 2012's fan starts spinning.

Considering how bad Apple Maps is, I’m not sure why they wouldn’t spend resources improving that before making a web version that absolutely no one will use because it will suck as much as the app (if not more)

It has already been available on https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=maps&iaxm=maps

Good job apple team! Very smooth experience. Fyi you may want to sanitize some of your response headers because one can easily tell Envoy is running at the edge. Upstream service latency looks healthy though :)

Type "double bedroom" in to search. Is that booking.com spam?

Weird results. Looks like bad data fed in.

But Apple Maps has been on the web for ages? It's been DuckDuckGo's map service for as long as I've accidentally used it instead of just going to google maps manually

Hehe, rough.

For routing you have to click a POI, can't pick just any place on the map. Impossible to route POI to POI without typing out the name of at least on of them.

the only thing I like in Google maps more than Apple Maps is reviews. Yelp integration in Apple is annoying as it asks me to open an app to view photos from a place.

Pretty interesting how many things are clickable, but don't appear so. The cursor doesn't turn to "cursor: pointer".

I’ve been a Mac and iOS user since practically day 1, and I’m not a fan of Google’s privacy policies (or rather lack thereof). But frankly, Apple maps just sucks. A map app that doesn’t have trustworthy POIs is useless. My wife’s retail store moved locations about 5 months ago and its still showing the old location on Apple Maps. She was able to update the location on Google on the day they moved, but Apple just refuses to move it. She submitted multiple times to get it moved via Apple’s business owner portal, I submitted with the “report incorrect information” link multiple times over the course of months, and it still shows up wrong. The worst part is, you actually get a response that says they looked at your report and took action, yet they do absolutely nothing.

If you google for this, there’s tons of reports on Reddit and Apple’s discussion forums with the same complaints. Apple apparently doesn’t care.

Email maps_escalations@apple.com.

(Like emailing the CEO, this is the kind of thing that works only as long as most people don't try to do it.)

So weird! I was just looking for this 2 days ago, and was like, "Huh, I thought they had a web app??" Turns out it was always for devices native only. I had no idea this was coming but 2 days ago was the first time I was looking for a web version! Hahaha! :)

edit: Just tested it. Nice! Faster than Google Maps in my estimation. (panning and zooming the map builds and focuses faster). Google, please don't delete my account for criticism! hahaha! :)

Running Safari on MacOS (latest) I see in the console:

[Error] Could not connect to the server. [Error] Fetch API cannot load https://xp-qa.apple.com/report/2/xp_amp_web_perf_log due to access control checks. [Error] Failed to load resource: Could not connect to the server. (xp_amp_web_perf_log, line 0)

Looks like a beta bug.

> … is compatible with Safari and Chrome on Mac and iPad, as well as Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs.

So Apple forces you into walled gardens and leaves you to be spied upon. So much for their pro-privacy stance. Firefox isn't just not supported, it is being actively blocked: “Your current browser isn't supported”!

More evidence that the relationship between a user and a megacorp can only be adversarial (not that this is news).

No public transport directions within Tokyo. That's a pass.

Also, the animations are so PERKY and QUICK .. feels off.

It's weird that this doesn't work in Mobile Safari - and disappointing that it doesn't work in Firefox.

Worked fine on an iPad, or is that not Mobile Safari?

assuming apple maps was written in Swift or objective-C. you would think with the resources Apple have - it would have ported majority of their apps to the browser.

since the languages they use easily compile to wasm. just like how google earth uses c++ etc.

I haven’t looked at these closely but Apple has some WebAssembly powering some of their iWork on web stuff

The worst part of Apple Maps is it doesn't have "always point north" mode. That makes it unuseable for those of us that can't use non-North turn-by-turn maps.

It's been a feature request for many years now and Apple hasn't done anything about it.

Curious why you need the map to always point to north?

Hasn't Kagi been using this for their maps offering for a while now?

Web embedding for Apple Maps (via MapKit JS) has been around for a while now, but this standalone product is new.

I know that DuckduckGo has been using it.

What is the strategic rationale for offering Apple Maps on the web?

I would imagine that people who need Google Maps on the web are more likely to stick to that one platform everywhere. Offering Apple Maps on web makes needing to stick to Google Maps less necessary.

It’s the same reasoning as iTunes on Windows.

The more time moves on the more Apple's "App First/App Only" approach seems to feel like a mistake.

While yeah there has been a handful of benefits to it on iOS specifically, the move of real work to iPads never materialzed so real work still gets done on Macbooks and therefore searches for locations, calendars, documents, etc all end up in Google infrastructure instead of Apple.

Guides -> Latest -> "The Sexiest Hotels in Rome"

Hokay, then

Hilarious that it is 2024 and Apple are only now releasing a browser version of their maps. Reminds me of how god-awfully outdated Safari and iMessage are, but Apple pursues their walled garden policy regardless.

Apple maps requires js to work. Google maps and Mapquest don't require js.

While most people use js by default, this requirement indicates that Apple requires a greater footprint to run maps than Google or Mapquest.

Why should they optimize for the <0.1% of people who don't have JS enabled?

It doesn't support iOS Safari.

Map looks terribly (like ~5y) outdated.

You need to be specific. It's very much location based in terms of data quality and how current it is. It's great in the SF Bay Area, which isn't surprising given where Apple is based.

Is there a way to use light mode?

Safari on iOS is not supported?

Doesn’t work on safari mobile

Google Chrome Linux in English Version 127.0.6533.72 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Your current browser isn't supported

It's a early beta. It's not surprising to limit testing to what you know first.

I mean this seems like the same thing that happened to the rest of the market already… the consolidation is just happening within the chrome ecosystem rather than it happening to the alternatives.

Almost as if it was a bad idea to kick away the last check against chrome monoculture. Maybe more mono than people anticipated.

Doesn't work with Firefox?! Are we back to this shit where all the companies want us to use IE6? Come on, this is so janky. Especially for a company like Apple.

https://i.imgur.com/SQl7YUh.png

Doesn’t work on iPhones, not sure I understand the point?

And doesn’t DDG use Apple Maps already? At least it appears to do so on my iPhone.

Um, I'm confused. I didn't think Apple treated Web as a significant part of their strategy.

Does this in some way imply that the web is a significant part of their strategy?

The button in the bottom left explains why this exists: It's a gateway to get more information about businesses and other attractions from entities out there in the world that don't live in the Apple ecosystem. Apple Maps ultimately needs a direct line to the real world to be maximally useful, especially against its competitors, and this is their attempt to build that bridge.

No support for any browser on Linux. Yeah, goodbye.

now we can use a suboptimal map application in the browser! Great!!!!!!!!!

Ha ha ha Apple still thinks 'the web' is Apple or Microsoft (https://support.apple.com/en-us/120585) and Firefox is not supported at all. It's time to shake the last rotten apple from the tree.

I normally find that stuff I build for the web just works in Chrome and Firefox and it’s Safari that requires hacks and workarounds, even when I’m using standard APIs that are widely supported. I’d have to go out of my way to have something work in Chrome but not Firefox.

I'm impressed with how well they've enforced that as well. I tried spoofing my UA to be safari (which I fully expected to not work), but it also didn't accept when I set my UA to Chrome.

What's especially odd is that Apple acknowledges Firefox's existence in their WWDC videos about web features, when they mention browser compatibility or who they're working with.

Odd, since the underlying MapKit JS supports Firefox.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs/

Firefox only has a marginal market share, so I can understand it's not a high priority target platform.

Even Chrome on Linux isn't supported.

We only support Firefox, because people on the team care to spend some extra cycles.

Its dwilling 3% market share means it no longer makes into project delivery acceptance browser matrices.

It is the good will of some that keeps it around.

Seems like a baseless restriction. I can't find anything wrong with Firefox support itself as I changed my user agent under Firefox and Apple Maps works fine.

It sucks when companies restrict normal access to a website when it's uncalled for. It's not the first time I've gotten "Use Google Chrome" for no reason.

Beta version supports Mac, iPad or Windows.

So you cannot view maps from Safari browser on iPhone.

I am curious what they use that Firefox is not supported…

Apple says that MapKit.JS works on Firefox, so this beta web page is probably just working out bugs before they release for FF. Perhaps a rendering issue?

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs/

And even in their supported browsers (Chrome at least) I got the "unsupported browser" on Fedora Linux.. Wonder what makes a online map need such a specific (even if its widely used) setup.

Not only does it not support Firefox, but all Chromium variants are broken.. it only supports the Chrome spyware browser

The iCloud web apps work just fine in Firefox, I use them all the time on Linux. They'll get there.

Interestingly it works on Opera although the colours are weird (lots of dark greens and blues). On both versions (Edge and Opera), my local bakery is mis-located (by hundreds of yards) compared with its (correctly) reported location on an iPhone.

It's not financially worth supporting, Firefox has 6.53% of desktop and 0.53% of mobile marketshare (Statcounter), with a switching cost of zero if users encounter a breaking issue.

Not surprising it got to this point, Mozilla has been stagnant on features most users care about and catered exclusively to the privacy crowd for years - which isn't a large group and competes with Chromium offshoots (giving it a smaller niche, privacy but demanding an alternative rendering engine).

Blocks deliberately:

    * Epiphany with WebKit2-Renderengine. The literally block their own engine.
    * Firefox with Gecko.

What year is it? 2001?

No web developer should be allowed to “block” webbrowser. Test for features and say “this thing doesn’t work because of and I don’t care about another solution”. Same shitty experience with Microsoft Teams which blocked - at least some months ago - the call buttons for Firefox, despite everything works fine. And Confluence which claims they don’t block but started, Epipany is now hiding as Safari and…surprise…everything works.

From the announcement

> Support for additional languages, browsers, and platforms will be expanded over time.

This is a beta. You have to start somewhere.

1-2% browser share is a common cutoff for support and Firefox is hurdling towards it. Maybe they’re looking ahead just a few months.

Trying it with Firefox ESR...

> Your current browser isn't supported

> See Supported Browsers↗

https://support.apple.com/en-us/120585

> On your Mac or iPad: Safari, Edge, Chrome

> On your Windows PC: Edge, Chrome

No platform other than Apple-Microsoft proprietary ones?

No browser other than Chrome/Edge plus Safari?

Apple should really be more sympathetic to open standards Web. They might be one regulatory decision away from Google Chrome taking over as the popular browser on Apple products as well. One defense is to hold Google-Microsoft and sites to Web open standards, not bless the proprietary Web.

It appears to work perfectly fine on Firefox. They are only applying the user agent check on the root path, so if you hit https://beta.maps.apple.com/anything it will work on Firefox.

I believe I've tried all the (pretty limited) functionality and I haven't found any justification for blocking Firefox.

That’s weird because you’ve been able to use their embedded web maps for a few years now just fine with Firefox. Wonder what gotcha they ran into implementing the full thing that needed a browser check?

Edit: their browser check is just bad. I get it in safari too.

It feels like back in the “optimized for Internet Explorer” days.

I just tried it in Chrome on Linux and it didn't work. Even tried switching my user agent so it would look like i was on Windows but that didn't work either.

Yes this is a huge miss. It's IE all over again.

That is why it is named beta.

So weird to see a demand for adherence to open standards justified by... the desire to see Apple preserve the dominance of its decidedly-closed device ecosystem.

Doesn’t even work with alternative web browsers on iOS which are just using embedded Safari.

I saw this same issue on MacOS... in Safari, so probably just a bug.

Amusingly, it’s also unsupported on Mobile Safari.

Under the Helpful? option on that page, I chose No and submitted a comment expressing my disappointment that there was no support for Firefox or any other browser for GNU/Linux users. While I can access Apple Maps on my iPhone, I prefer to be able to view maps on my large desktop monitor.

Yeah this isn't a web app... this is a Chrome+Safari app

Maybe they will by the time they come out of beta? It only just launched.

The page you reference even acknowledges this:

>Availability varies depending on region. To start, Maps on the web is available only in English. Maps on the web will be available for additional browsers, platforms, and languages soon.

> Your browser [Firefox] is not supported. See supported browsers

Welcome to 2007 I guess!

Not only Firefox is not supported, but even Chrome on Linux doesn't work. It's embarrassing for a company such as Apple.

I understand they "cannot test every possible browser" and that "users may get subpar experience".

I don't understand why there isn't "continue at your own risk" button. Maybe with a scary warning. It's kind of stupid that I have to spoof UA for a website to let me in. And in most cases, everything just works fine.

Maybe one day I'll create a website to inform about the issue.

Firefox, while still significant, represents a smaller portion of users. But I think that the absence of initial support for Firefox doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be supported in the future. Yet I hope so.

Yeah, I don't think you should expect people to support every niche browser.

Weird. They claim Firefox is not supported, but with some user-agent switcharoo it seems to work fine.

Ugh.

Well isn't that exactly what "supported" means?

It may or may not work, but since that is a bad user experience, they disable it.

"Works through hacking" is not the same as being supported. See Hackintosh.

Yeah they are just being lazy and not testing it... so rather than verify it works and fix bugs, they just check your browser agent and redirect you if you aren't using Chrome or Safari. So ghetto! Reeks of the late-90s/early-2000s "Use IE6" messages that companies used to put out when they built a site using Microsoft web components or proprietary APIs.

"Hey look, I can save my PowerPoint as a web page! And it even has the animations!" Except it's 2024, and we have standards, and for them to say, "Oh we don't adhere to the standards" is shockingly bad.

I can’t wait for Apple Maps to dump yelp. Am I the only one that that thinks yelp reviews are useless?

Apple has nothing to replace it with. It's hard to imagine Apple adding reviews and trying to police that — policing their own App Store reviews seems to give the trouble (but perhaps is not a solvable problem).

They've added ratings to the Maps app for certain categories of businesses (or maybe it's for businesses not in Yelp, dunno). It looks like they are testing it out. It also supports picture upload.

A one star place on Yelp is a warning, especially if there are implied health code violations. But anything else between two and five, I look at the pictures of the food and decide for myself. There's gaming going on for years but pictures can tell a lot, even if it's not everything.

The anti Yelp restaurants that delist themselves from various sites for whatever reason do not exist to me and will never get my business because I will never even think about them when I am thinking about where to eat.

Is there anything better to replace it with? Even if they could use Google's reviews, I don't feel they are much better. I guess they could do a deal with TripAdvisor, which is the only other site I can think of that has fairly comprehensive coverage of reviews, but is TripAdvisor really a step up from Yelp?

Yelp's biggest advantage is that if there are recent reviews, the business probably still exists.

Yelp was high value in the past - its going to low value in the recent years. It's also regional in its value.

Interestingly it is user-agent blocked on Firefox, as noted in sibling comments. But Kagi (the search engine) has been using Apple Maps on their site (kagi.com/maps) for a good while now.

So has DuckDuckGo (the search engine) https://duckduckgo.com/?iaxm=maps&q=Manchester

Apple launching web apps? And Maps of all things? Suppose that's the logical order. (Should it have been mail first? Or a search engine?)

What year is it?

What's with the browser restrictions too?

Just a theory. But I think they are preparing for the notion that there's a growing number of PWAs in their app stores. And most of those would be using things like maplibre or Google Maps. So, to address that (given that they can't really stop PWAs), it makes sense to make Apple Maps usable outside of the Apple platforms. This way, people can develop PWA apps and have some level of integration with Apple maps on IOS. Just a theory.

The browser restrictions are probably because developing hardware accelerated map rendering engines for the web is a bit of a project and the support for things like WASM and Web GPU in Safari is probably requiring dealing with some Apple specific quirks. Maybe they'll get around to that eventually. I think for most web developers, no Firefox support would be a show stopper. There's no point to this strategy unless they address that.

> Apple launching web apps?

KeyNote, Mail, Numbers, Pages and Photos have been available as web apps for years (and minor ones such as Notes and Reminders)

As others have said, they already have a few (Mail, Music, iWork, FaceTime, etc). Like FaceTime coming to browser, and apple music going to android, this is probably an attempt to cast a wider net for their ecosystem. Also the EU DMA law is could be causing some strange behavior here.

I wouldn't be surprised to see apple try and release some expanded subscription that includes mapping features. Not sure what TBH and there have been no leaks, but they're searching for revenue streams, and the App Store is getting eyed by regulators.

Oh and the browser restriction is probably temporary - MapKit.js works on all major platforms, even Firefox, so its safe to assume this will get there too.

Mail was always available through icloud.com though

Apple Music has had an excellent web app for a while

Mail might not have been a top priority given the existing solutions like iCloud.com

When I see the low level of support that Apple provides for various less popular web browsers, it reminds me of a certain story:

A friend of mine once worked a long time ago at an IT company that was building an online store. He wrote a script there that displayed a message whenever someone accessed the site using Netscape "Get lost, jerk, with that Netscape and go straighten bananas on a tree”.

The company was quite popular in my country, and that message caused a lot of outrage on Usenet groups.

"Your current browser isn't supported" Okay.

Firefox users are being marginalized within a few days by X and now by Apple. A sign of things to come?

How were Firefox users marginalized by X?

The Advent is neigh.

Firefox is being marginalised mostly by Mozilla corporation others seem to just don't care much about dying browser, it is weird that it is broken on Safari with iOS for some folks as it is Apple product.

Firefox is not supported. Move along. Nothing to see there.

Pretty much. Even as a disillusioned mac user I wouldn't rely on their maps app but no compatibility with my browser of choice means that I'll never bother using their product under any circumstances.

Apple? The Web? What?

Apple: Launches beta product

Hacker News users: oh ma gad they can't guarantee it works on my Netscape fork

Heaven knows Apple would never give me anything for free. So, Apple will have to PAY ME to try their beta product. The era of free work is over.

I have to say, this is pretty bad even for a beta.

* the map is downright unreadable on a 34 inch ultrawide screen on Chrome/macOS, in dark mode - it's very dark grey on black, with small text in a weird font

* the UI is obviously mobile-style, badly inspired by Google Maps, with a tiny bar to the left; even when clicking on submenus (guides -> one of the guides), it stays miniscule even though there's a massive real estate to work on

* there's only by car and by foot, which means it's useless for a lot of the world that uses public transit or biking

* for some reason it defaults to the wrong measurement system even though my locale and location should be enough to deduce I don't care about miles

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