Apple today has expanded its popular Apple Maps Flyover feature to a pair of new cities, while it has also rolled out Spotlight Suggestions to new countries and its traffic data to a single new location. Last month, the company expanded Maps Nearby, Flyover, and traffic data to a handful of new locations, following a more significant Flyover expansion that occurred in February of this year.
For Flyover, the iOS 9 feature is now available in Akron, Ohio and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. This brings the grand total of Flyover locations to over 260 cities as Apple has been expanding the feature at a brisk pace.
Additionally, Apple has expanded Spotlight Suggestions to a trio of new countries. The feature is now available in 19 countries with today’s additions of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Spotlight Suggestions, for those unfamiliar, offer quick suggestions of content and locations from Maps, iTunes, the App Store, and web when users search for a term via the Spotlight search bar on their device.
Finally, Apple Maps users in Thailand have today gained access to traffic data. Traffic data is now available in 34 counties with today’s expansion. Traffic data helps users plan ahead and see what delays they could potentially be facing due to factors such as wrecks and construction.
You can view specific location and country information for Apple Maps, Siri, and other services on Apple’s iOS 9 Feature Availability webpage.
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Anyone else agrees that it is time to give up flyover? Google Street View concept is a whole lot more useful as it shows street level views. At this point, Flyover might be more useful for pilots.
It’s fun. But I haven’t used either to find things.
I’d much rather they add biking directions in big cities, a away to zoom out with one hand, a way to see which direction you are facing without centering and twisting the map around, a way to pan around the map in driving directions, and a way to get to directions to home/work without having to scroll past the search filters or reach a button in the far upper left.
but hey, we can waste time flying around another city… woo.
Biking directions, yes we need those.
Zoom out with one hand, okay….. perhaps
See which way you’re facing, that’s already there mate. Tap the GPS icon (bottom left) twice,
Way to pan around the map in driving directions, honestly have no clue what you mean by this..
A way to get home/work without blabla, there is.. if it’s (apparently) to much of a bother to press the direction button on the top left where you can select home, work and favourites with ease… Then just tell siri “take me home” or “take me to work”..
Hey, just to clarify a few points. The gps button also centers and changes the orientation of the map. That’s a fine feature but I don’t always want that. Sometimes I want to have destination or pin in view on the map and see if I’m walking the right way. Look at google maps. They just always have an arrow pointing which direction you are moving from your pin. It’s so useful. They also have the gps button which orients the map but I hardly use that anymore.
And yes it’s a bother to reach the very upper left. Google has a button for directions close to the bottom. And if you reach up to the search bar, which is just habit to always do, directions to home is the first option vs being hidden below all the search filters.
If people are browsing or searching for stuff to do than they can spend a second to scroll a little. But getting directions to work and home is so common it should be the easiest thing to do.
I would use siri more but honestly it’s hit or miss still.
Although I agree with you that Google Street View is much more useful, right now, than the flyover is. You have to understand that they both serve entirely different purposes. And right now it might not be more than a gimmick. But as they keep expanding (and improving quality) it will allow for a world of possibilities. Schooling, Planning, Instructional, Elderly care and even games. essentially what they’re doing is mapping the entire world in 3D… Think of the possibilities.. And yes, that will take a while, so give it some time.
I agree, I’ve never had a practical reason to use Flyover. Google street view is immensely helpful. I still find Google Maps superior to Apple. Apple needs to get the lead out and really start improving their maps for practical use. There has been times where I’ve reported errors on Google Maps and Apple Maps, I got a same day or next day response from Google and they fixed the issue. It still took Apple a week or more and sometimes not at all.
We have had Spotlight suggestions for 1.5 week here in Denmark.
Maps is great but Apple needs to do a lot of work on the database that drives the Spotlight search. The maps are accurate, but the database is very patchy.
Here in the UK, I often need to find a village or small town, so I enter it’s name, but the suggestions are often hopelessly inappropriate. It’s quite likely to come up with a business in a different town that has that name within it, or somewhere in North America which uses that name. I report these oddities and the ones that I know of are mostly fixed, but they keep happening when I look for new places.
I could understand it if the villages were so small that they were not marked on the map, but if you know where they are, you can see them named within the map, so why does that name not appear in the search results? The most reliable way to search for a place is to enter the postal code rather than the name.
For instance, if I search for Loch Ness ( the huge body of water in Scotland with the legendary monster ), I get results for businesses in Edinburgh and Glasgow, two places in Canada and one in Salisbury Maryland, but it fails to identify the Loch itself, which is clearly marked on the map. Similarly, a search for Lake Windermere ( a famous tourist spot in the Lake District in the UK ) came up with a place in Orlando being the top suggestion, with other suggestions including two in IL and others in CT, VA, MI, GP with another in Australia. It would be nice to think that when I do a search on Apple Maps that it would be smart enough to think that the places I’m looking for are more likely to be relatively close to home rather than in distant continents.
If it makes you feel better I live in the States and often get search results from Europe when trying to get the phone number of a pizza shop or the name of the town a mile or two away from me. :-)
The picture shows Bern, the capital of Switzerland. As far as I know, street view is not available there.
Akron, Ohio but not Ottawa, Canada??? Yeeesh…
I thought Flyover was cool for a second, and then I realized I would never need or have a use for this. Street View is the same way. Half of the time I can’t even see the actual thing I’m looking for the times I’ve messed with it, and those are the times it doesn’t crash the browser.
And still no transit data for Tokyo—maybe it’ll be ready for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics! Google is eating Apple’s lunch in Tokyo.
Siri spotlight suggestions working in INDIA also. it started to work suddenly today morning.
Why doesn’t Apple release a web version of their maps for everyone?
As someone who has both Apple and Google maps on my iPhone — Google’s are still vastly superior in almost every respect, especially detail and accuracy. Street view is incredibly helpful when I’m going to a place and I need to actually see how it looks like on the spot. I can work from my Desktop PC, create and explore routes, click “send to my mobile” and it’s just so smooth.