Apple Maps are bigger, bolder and better than ever.
As of today, Apple Mapls delivers new, beautifully detailed experiences to explore great Canadian cities.
Maps adds a three-dimensional city view with rich detail, enhanced navigation, immersive walking directions, and more for Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver
The Apple Maps city experience is now available in Canada, offering users rich three-dimensional details for Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. The newly enhanced city experience —which expands on the new map that Apple spent years building from the ground up —includes enhanced navigation and amazing details for road markings, land cover, trees, elevation, and public transit routes; introduces a new windshield view for drivers and immersive walking directions shown in augmented reality; and much more.
The views are quite amazing and life-like, including details such as trees in Vancouver’s Stanley Park.
Apple Maps
“We’re excited for Apple Maps users to explore the beauty and culture of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver in an incredibly detailed new way,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services. “Built with privacy at its core, this update is the continuation of our commitment to building the best, most accurate map of the world —with a beautifully designed experience and attention to detail that only Apple can deliver.”
Explore Cities with Highly Detailed Maps
Maps introduces new ways to navigate cities with a visually stunning 3D map that offers unprecedented detail for neighbourhoods, commercial districts, marinas, buildings, and more. In Maps, users can see elevation details across a city, new road details, and custom-designed landmarks such as the Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal, and Robson Square in Vancouver. A beautiful nighttime mode with a moonlit glow activates at dusk. In addition to Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto, the new Maps experience is also available in world-class cities around the world, including London, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.
Editor’s note: I’ve seen these maps in action, and they’re absolutely terrific.
Apple Maps
Enhanced Navigation Provides a Better Driving Experience
Maps now features even more road details to help drivers navigate through cities more easily and safely. Turn lanes, medians, bus and taxi lanes, and crosswalks are clearly displayed for navigating busy intersections. When approaching overlapping complex interchanges, Maps shows a road-level view, making it easier to see upcoming traffic conditions or the best lane for an approaching exit. These new navigation features join route planning, which provides the estimated time of arrival for future departures based on expected traffic, as well as lane guidance, speed limits, and natural language guidance available through CarPlay.
Never Miss a Stop with Powerful Transit Updates
Maps offers improvements for public transit riders with an updated transit map. Nearby stations are prominently displayed at the top of the screen, and users can pin their favourite lines in Maps so the best route is just one tap away. Once a transit route is selected, Maps will automatically notify the user when it is time to disembark as they approach their final destination, and riders can even keep track on Apple Watch. These updates build on transit features already available in Maps, including real-time transit, which provides detailed transit schedules, live departure times, arrival times, the current location of a bus or train en route, and system connections to help plan a journey. Maps also includes important real-time information like outages.
Immersive Walking Directions
With iOS 15, Maps introduces step-by-step walking guidance in augmented reality. Users can simply raise their iPhone to scan buildings in the area, and Maps generates a highly accurate position to deliver detailed directions that can be viewed in the context of the real world. Augmented reality guidance is currently available in London, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington, D.C.
Discover Great Places with Curated Guides
Maps makes it easy to discover the many things to see and do in cities around the world through curated Guides created by a selection of trusted resources. In iOS 15, users can tap the Explore Guides button in Maps to access over two thousand expertly curated guides that include recommendations from respected Canadian brands such as Toronto Life and Narcity, to global brands like Lonely Planet. Curated Guides can be saved, and they are automatically updated when new places are added, so users always have the latest recommendations. Users can even create their own personal Guides of favourite places to share with friends and family.
Interactive Globe
In iOS 15, Maps offers a rich and interactive three-dimensional globe that introduces a whole new way of looking at the world. The globe shows Earth’s natural beauty with amazing textures and contours. Users can see vibrant details of mountain ranges, deserts, rainforests, oceans, and more. Now even the most remote and precious locations on the planet can be explored right from iPhone.
Cycling Directions
Now available for Montreal, as well as Toronto and Vancouver, cycling directions show the elevation for a ride, how busy a street is, and whether there are stairs along a route. With voice guidance and Haptic Touch on Apple Watch, users can stay even more focused on the path ahead while enjoying their ride. In addition to the new updates available in iOS 15, Maps offers many other useful features:
- Look Around gives users a way to explore parts of the world through an interactive 3D ground-level experience and a smooth, seamless 360-degree view. Users anywhere across the globe can explore places locally like Calgary, Halifax, Ottawa, and Toronto. International users can discover destinations such as Chicago, Dublin, Los Angeles, New York City, Tokyo, and more.
- Cycling directions, in addition to Montreal, are available in Arizona, Barcelona, Boston, China, Las Vegas, London, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Philadelphia, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington state, and Washington, D.C.
- Speed cameras let users know when approaching speed and red light cameras along a route, with the added ability to see where cameras are located on the map.
- Share ETA enables users to share an estimated time of arrival with family, friends, and coworkers with a simple tap or by asking Siri.
- Incident reports make it possible to safely and easily report an accident, hazard, or speed check along a route by simply letting Siri know “There’s an accident up ahead” or “There is something on the road.” Users can even report when incidents displayed on the map have been cleared, all while keeping their focus on the road.
- Favourites provides one-tap navigation to frequently visited places. Whether headed home, to work, to the gym, or to school, users can simply tap and go once a location is added to Favourites on the launch screen.
- Indoor Maps for airports and malls allow users to simply open the Maps app and see what level they’re on, look for restrooms, and even find out which stores and restaurants are open. I’ve used this feature at airports in Canada, and it’s a huge help.
Maps and Privacy
Apple is committed to keeping personal information safe and has built privacy into the core of Maps. With Maps, no sign-in is required. Personalized features, such as suggesting departure time to make the next appointment, are created using on-device intelligence. Any data collected by Maps while using the app, including search terms, navigation routing, and traffic information, is associated with random identifiers that regularly reset to prevent connecting search and location data stored on the server to a unique user. Maps goes even further to obscure a user’s location on Apple servers when searching for a location through a process called “fuzzing.” Maps converts the precise location where the search originated to a less-exact one within 24 hours.
