CITIES LIKELY COMING SOON

If we look for commonalities between all twenty-one cities that Apple has released the DCE for thus far...

...we find four commonalities:

   1. All were visited by Apple Maps Backpack Image Collection at least three months before they were released.

   2. All are covered by Apple’s in-house map data.

   3. All have “Look Around” coverage.

   4. All have POI labels in “Look Around”.

As it turns out, another twenty-six cities—in addition to the twenty-one that Apple has already shipped—also currently have these commonalities (all of the cities in bold in the table below)...¹

...which gives us a shortlist of the cities that Apple might release in the near future:²

   🇦🇺 Australia (2): Brisbane & Perth.

   🇧🇪 Belgium (1): Brussels.

   🇫🇮 Finland (1): Helsinki.

   🇫🇷 France (2): Lyon & Paris.

   🇮🇪 Ireland (1): Dublin.

   🇮🇹 Italy (2): Milan & Rome.

   🇱🇺 Luxembourg (1): Luxembourg City.

   🇳🇱 Netherlands (1): Amsterdam.

   🇳🇿 New Zealand (1): Auckland.

   🇳🇴 Norway (1): Oslo.

   🇵🇹 Portugal (1): Lisbon.

   🇸🇬 Singapore (1): Singapore.

   🇪🇸 Spain (2): Barcelona & Madrid.

   🇸🇪 Sweden (1): Stockholm.

   🇨🇭 Switzerland (1): Zürich.

   🇬🇧 United Kingdom (1): Edinburgh.

   🇺🇸 United States (6): Denver, Detroit, Honolulu, Houston, Phoenix, & Portland.

We can then take that list and re-order it by the order in which each city was first visited by Apple’s Backpack Image Collection effort—with the idea here being that these are the cities that Apple has been working on the longest:

   1. Aug 2020: 🇬🇧 Edinburgh

   2. Apr 2021: 🇮🇪 Dublin

   3. May 2021: 🇦🇺 Brisbane, 🇺🇸 Denver, 🇺🇸 Detroit, & 🇦🇺 Perth

   4. Jun 2021: 🇺🇸 Portland

   5. Jul 2021: 🇵🇹 Lisbon

   6. Aug 2021: 🇫🇷 Lyon, 🇫🇷 Paris, & 🇮🇹 Rome

   7. Jan 2022: 🇳🇿 Auckland & 🇸🇬 Singapore

   8. Mar 2022: 🇳🇱 Amsterdam, 🇪🇸 Barcelona, & 🇪🇸 Madrid

   9. Apr 2022: 🇧🇪 Brussels, 🇱🇺 Luxembourg City, 🇺🇸 Phoenix, & 🇨🇭 Zürich

   10. May 2022: 🇫🇮 Helsinki, 🇺🇸 Honolulu, 🇮🇹 Milan, 🇳🇴 Oslo, & 🇸🇪 Stockholm

   11. Sep 2022: 🇺🇸 Houston

While this is unlikely to be the exact order of Apple’s upcoming DCE releases, it does hint at which cities are likely to be released relatively sooner. In particular, the eleven cities surveyed by backpack in 2020 and 2021 (those in bold above) seem especially likely to be the next DCE cities.

It’s also worth noting that there have generally been three other clues as to which cities are likely to receive the DCE in the near future:

   1. AR walking directions are usually released for the city several months prior to it receiving the DCE.

   2. Icons with custom colors and logos for the city’s transit systems often start appearing in Apple Maps’s “Explore” map mode. (Usually these only appear in the “Transit” map mode—but once Apple starts prepping the DCE, they also start appearing in “Explore” mode.) Keep in mind though that this has only happened for roughly half of the DCEs released thus far.

   3. In some cases, 3D building footprints will turn white or temporarily disappear from the map—especially those associated with landmarks and major Apple retail locations. In other cases, grey 3D models of landmarks will sometimes be upgraded with even more detailed grey models prior to release. (Chicago’s Willis Tower was a good example of this.)

While there have been exceptions to all three clues, they’re still worth paying attention to. And as of late April 2023, some of these clues are now present in Paris—such 3D buildings that have gone missing and more detailed landcover being added:

CITIES LIKELY COMING EVENTUALLY

As mentioned above, Apple needs to collect imagery via backpack in order to release the “Detailed City Experience” for a given area. So one way to look at the current list of the 137 metros visited by Apple’s backpack collection effort is that it’s also a list of all of the metros that Apple will eventually release the “Detailed City Experience” for:

As of now, it appears that Apple is focusing more on the U.S. than any other country:

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1  Apple has been releasing the DCE for parts of entire metro areas and metro regions rather than just individual cities (e.g., large parts of the San Francisco Bay Area region were released, rather than just the city of San Francisco). So whenever you see “cities” on this page, what is really meant is “metro areas”.

Wherever Apple has collected backpack imagery for multiple cities and localities within a metro or region, those records have been folded into the record for the metro’s primary city (since Apple is likely to continue releasing the DCE for entire metros and regions).  ↩︎

2  Though they don’t have Apple’s in-house map data, it wouldn’t surprise me to see the DCE or a modified version of it released for cities in China and Japan over the next couple of years. At this point, Japan seems likelier than China—with Tokyo, Osaka/Kyoto, and Nagoya being the metros likeliest to receive it first. ↩︎

UPDATE #1
JUNE 2023

On June 5, 2023, Apple released the DCE for Paris.

UPDATE #2
JULY 2023

On July 27, 2023, Apple released the DCE for the Dallas-Forth Worth and Houston areas.