When Apple Maps launched in 2012, it featured hand-drawn icons for landmarks in New York and San Francisco:

In the years since, Apple has added hundreds more across the world...¹

...and a number of cities now have sizable collections:

Now, seven years after Apple Maps’s launch, Google appears to be introducing its own take on Apple’s landmark icons:

On October 3, 2019, Google added custom landmark icons to nine cities, including Barcelona, Florence, London, Mumbai, New York, Paris, Rome, San Francisco, and Tokyo:

UPDATE #1 | June 2020

On June 3, 2020, Google changed the appearance of all of the landmark icons it had added in October. For example, here’s New York:

And Paris:

While Google’s new icons more closely resemble Apple’s, they’re also much bigger and prominent than Apple’s:

In addition to updating the look of its landmark icons, Google also added icons in several new cities, such as Los Angeles, Milan, and Madrid (pictured below):

UPDATE #2 | September 2020

Google continues to add custom landmark icons to more and more cities.

As of September 2020, at least twenty-five cities now have these icons, including Amsterdam, Bangkok, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest, Dubai, Florence, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur, Kyoto, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Milan, Mumbai, Munich, New York, Osaka, Paris, Prague, Rome, San Francisco, Sydney, Tokyo, and Vienna.

At this time, only the Android and iOS versions of Google Maps have these icons. (The web versions do not.)

UPDATE #3 | October 2020

One year after quieting adding them, Google formally announced that it’s adding icons for landmarks to Google Maps.

According to Google, the icons are an enhancement to its “Live View” AR navigation feature:

Google’s announcement helps explain why these icons don’t appear on the web versions of Google Maps. (“Live View” is only available in the Android and iOS versions of Google Maps.)

UPDATE #4 | December 2020

Google continues to add custom landmark icons to more and more cities.

As of December 2020, icons have been added for Athens, Bengaluru, Boston, Brasília, Brussels, Bucharest, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Cape Town, Casablanca, Chennai, Chicago, Cologne, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Kiev, Kolkata, Lima, Lisbon, Manila, Marrakesh, Melbourne, Mexico City, Miami, Montreal, Moscow, Nagoya, Nairobi, New Delhi, Nice, Oslo, Philadelphia, Rio de Janeiro, Riyadh, Saint Petersburg, Santiago, São Paulo, Seattle, Shanghai, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Taipei, Tehran, Vancouver, Venice, Warsaw, Washington, and Zurich.

In total, Google now has custom landmark icons in at least 80 cities. And as of this writing, Google Maps now has more of these icons than Apple Maps.

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1  Apple Maps’s landmark icons are the work of Mikio Inose. ↩︎