Apple Starts Publishing Its Own Apple Maps Guides
December 2021
After a year and a half of outsourcing the creation of its Apple Maps Guides to more than seventy third-party publishers, Apple now appears to be creating its own in-house Guides.
Apple’s in-house publication (titled “Hyperlocal”) currently offers five guides, with each covering either the New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco areas and being centered around a celebrity’s place “picks” for a given city:
The total number of Apple Maps Guides has been growing steadily over the past year. At the end of Q2, there were 1,066 Guides; at Q3’s end, there were 1,409; and now as of mid-December, there are 1,798. In other words, Apple has been adding roughly 400 new guides every three months.
But even though the total number of Guides has been growing, they still largely tend to cover the same handful of metro areas. For instance, 377 of Apple’s current 1,798 Guides (more than one in five) cover either the New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco areas—while many major global cities have no Guides at all.