Why Is Apple Maps Launching a Web App in 2024?

Earlier this week, Apple launched a Web version of Apple Maps. I published some thoughts on Localogy’s blog about how this might affect Local SEO.

Mike Blumenthal asked perhaps the key question:

Both Mike and Uberall’s Krystal Taing speculated that a Web version of Apple Maps could be laying the groundwork for apps/apis that require a Web presence.  This could certainly be the case, but Apple Maps has had embeddable Web views available for five years via Mapkit JS.

What would having a full Web interface make possible that couldn’t be done with Mapkit JS?

Of course one can only speculate, but that’s the fun of being a Local SEO blogger 🙂

Some initial ideas:

1. Provide a better experience for the estimated 400M iPhone users who have a Windows PC. I fire up Apple Maps on my Mac regularly. Seems like table stakes for every iPhone user to be able to do so; and building a Web app is a lot more practical than a stand alone Windows app.
2. Create more opportunities for Google Maps/Waze users on iPhones (or any phone for that matter) to trial Apple Maps. If 70% of iPhone users use Google Maps, finding more ways to expose them to Apple Maps seems like a good idea. Odds are these people are going to be on iPhones for the rest of their lives. Converting them to Apple Maps users (and away from Google Maps and its ads) makes it even more critical that Google pay Apple over $20B/year to get in front of its users. Apple could probably justify investing in the Web app just on this alone.
3. This may be kind of what Mike & Krystal were alluding to, but perhaps Apple is building a new thing for the Vision Pro, or maybe they want the data for Apple Intelligence, Apple’s AI initiative.
4. Maybe Apple wants to actually start building its own local reviews “corpus”. If so, this is a way to scale it.
5. Or maybe Apple wanted to give local businesses something they could actually easily link to from their websites. I imagine we’ll see more “Find us on Apple Maps” links popping up.
6. Or maybe, after like a decade of sitting on their hands, Apple Map’s SEO team finally was able to get that ticket prioritized.

Local SEO different, indeed.