...but if you searched for these venues, such as “baseball diamonds”, you’d often receive no search results—even if you had panned the map directly over them:
And you’d see the same for most of the other sports-related shapes that Apple had added, such as basketball courts:
And tennis courts:
With rare exceptions, these sports-related shapes never seemed to appear in Apple Maps’s search results or get labeled on the map with icons and text.
So it seemed as if Apple had extracted these shapes from its aerial and satellite imagery—but hadn’t also created entries for them in its POI database. In other words, Apple wasn’t creating labels out of its shapes.
But two years later, there are signs that this is changing. On June 17, 2020, Apple quietly added thousands of labels for baseball diamonds, basketball courts, and tennis courts across the U.S.—such as here in New York:
And here in San Francisco:
And even in rural areas, such as my small hometown in Northern Illinois:
And unlike before, most of these sports-related shapes now appear in Apple Maps’s search results:
But unlike most of Apple’s other POI labels, these new labels have no reviews, ratings, photos, or mentions of any of Apple’s third-party data providers (such as Yelp) in their info cards. Instead, all that’s listed is their address...
It also appears that these labels are the product of an algorithmic process. For example, many of Apple’s sports-related shapes are still missing labels—such as this baseball diamond below:
And other shapes are misidentified, such as this small, rectangular patch of Chicago’s Millennium Park that’s labeled as a “Basketball Court”:
But the oddest thing about these new labels is that nearly all of them quietly disappeared from Apple Maps on August 26, 2020—just hours after Beau Giles uncovered and shared additional evidence that Apple might be building its own in-house place database:
UPDATE #1 | November 2, 2020
Apple appears to have quietly re-added the labels for basketball and tennis courts that it removed in late August.
However, Apple hasn’t added back the “baseball field” labels it had added (and then removed) earlier this year.
UPDATE #2 | December 1, 2020
As of December 1, 2020, these labels are missing again.
UPDATE #3 | July 1, 2021
As of July 1, 2021, these labels are still missing.