Malcolm Owen
Apple is bringing Look Around to more areas, including an expansion of existing locations for the Apple Maps feature and into new countries, including Egypt, China, and Turkey.
Apple's take on Google Street View, Look Around, already covers a large number of cities around the world, but it doesn't have the same reach as Google's version. A future expansion could help close the gap.
Spotted via @RhinozzCode on X and reported by MacRumors, a number of vector tiles used in the Apple Maps web beta have let slip the coverage lines of Look Around. This includes a far larger area that Look Around will expand to in the future.
For the United States, this will include an expansion out from major metropolitan areas to include major and some minor highways. This will mean coverage of some rural areas, not just urban landscapes.
There's also a list of countries that will get their first Look Around treatments, including Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, China, Belarus, Turkey, Bulgaria, Mexico, and Slovakia.
The last major expansion to Look Around added six central Europe countries to the roster in mid-2023, two weeks after a similar upgrade to more northern countries on the continent.
Andrew Orr
William Gallagher
Amber Neely
5 Comments
I was in my front yard when an Apple mapping car with cameras on top drove past. That was three years ago and Look Around still hasn’t become available in my neighborhood. Maybe this update will finally use the data that was collected that day.
How about Kanada?
It’s already available in Sweden, even in the countryside outside Uppsala, where I grew up, I just checked. Fun to see my old neighborhood.
Funny thing I noticed; the military airport outside Uppsala, where I live, is blurred in satellite view in Apple Maps on the Mac, but not on the iPad.
Just part of on going work that needs to be done for the Apple ecosystems (if Apple doesn’t do it for themselves), no one else will, which was the reason for doing Apple Maps in the first place for long-term strategic competitive reasons (thanks Google for the push), and Apple did it without crying to the USA government for help.