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Comment by thrdbndndn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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:"

Probably because you're on Mac/Safari.

It shows 302 to maps.google.com here even using the website you give: https://i.imgur.com/y4jUdOn.png

Yeah what it's showing is that on iOS/Safari (user agent) it returns a maps:// protocol address. This makes sense of all the reports here - it's trying to direct you to whatever maps app you've selected. Redirecting to google maps makes sense if the server doesn't think the maps:// result will do that.

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

Seems to be user agent.

~$ curl -v -A "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.5 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1" "https://maps.apple.com/?ll=41.77708546284588%2C-122.51487365..."

...

  < HTTP/2 302 
  < server: AkamaiGHost
  < content-length: 0
  < location: maps://maps.apple.com/?ll=41.77708546284588%2C-122.51487365132222&spn=0.04999999999999005%2C0.11502863436983546
  < expires: Thu, 25 Jul 2024 21:08:46 GMT
  < cache-control: max-age=0, no-cache, no-store

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!

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