If you are used to Google Maps, you probably know “Google Street View”. This fantastic feature allows you to visualize (by virtually moving) a street where you need to go to better know where a building is for example. Note that Apple Maps offers exactly the same feature, but under a different name: “Look Around”. Available in fewer places than Street View, Apple will expand the availability of Look Around in new locations.
Look Around arrives in new countries
Apple Maps is preparing a major expansion of its Look Around feature, a move that aims to compete more aggressively with Google Street View. While Google Street View is currently much more widely deployed around the world, this advancement can be explained by the fact that it has been around longer than Look Around on Apple Maps. Despite this difference in seniority, Apple seems determined to catch up by expanding the reach of this feature.
Apple Maps’ Look Around feature provides users with high-resolution, interactive images of a city’s streets, allowing for an immersive exploration of the location. With this technology, users can navigate along the path taken by the car that captured the images, simply by double-tapping a touchscreen or quickly double-clicking on a Mac. Currently, this feature is limited primarily to major tourist metropolitan areas and a few select countries.
However, that’s about to change. According to information shared by user Ryan Fae, who discovered clues in the underlying code of the beta version of Apple Maps’ web platform, an expansion of the “Look Around” coverage is planned in the coming months. This expansion will mark a significant step in Apple’s ambition to expand access to its feature in new countries.
In the United States, Look Around coverage will be expanded well beyond major cities to include major highways, small towns, and even some rural areas, making the experience more accessible to a wider range of users. Apple also plans to roll out the feature to several new countries:
- Morocco
- Egypt
- Jordan
- Syria
- Lebanon
- China
- Belarus
- Turkey
- Bulgaria
- Mexico
- Slovakia
The focus will initially be on large cities, before gradually expanding to smaller towns. Exactly the same approach as in the US!
With this expansion, Apple hopes to not only improve the user experience of its mapping service, but also close the gap with Google Street View by offering broader and more detailed coverage. The planned expansion of “Look Around” shows Apple’s commitment to positioning itself as a major player in the mapping service field, offering increasingly competitive features on a global scale.