Google started collecting Street View imagery in late 2006—and by late 2008, it had published imagery for seven countries, including large parts of the U.S.:

Sometime in 2008 (likely Q3¹), Google began an internal initiative called “Ground Truth” to create its own map based on information extracted from Street View and other data sources.

Roughly a year later, in October 2009, Google replaced its third-party map data in the U.S. (i.e., Tele Atlas’s data) with its own in-house map data generated via the “Ground Truth” project.

Six months after that, in April 2010, Google expanded its in-house map data to Canada:

And then over the next few years, Google rolled out its proprietary map data to a number of additional countries:²

Those who’ve been following the rollout of Apple’s proprietary map data (a.k.a., “Apple’s new map”)...

...will likely notice that Google rolled out its in-house map data much faster than Apple has been rolling its own data.

Thirty-eight months after its initial data release, Google’s proprietary map data covered thirty-eight countries, while thirty-nine months after Apple’s initial data release, Apple’s covers just eleven:³

That said, this is not a fair, apples-to-apples comparison, as Google did not originally release as much data as Apple is currently releasing.

For example, Google’s releases didn’t include comprehensive, country-wide 3D building coverage—nor did they include vegetation and landcover data for all zoom-levels or local details like baseball diamonds, swimming pools, tennis courts, and traffic lights.⁴

In any event, it’s interesting to look back and see how fast Google was able to cover large parts of world.

And it also raises intriguing questions regarding Apple’s mapping effort. For instance, could Apple be going much faster if it dropped one or two of the features that it’s currently shipping, such as the vegetation detail at every zoom or all of the sports field shapes?

Clearly, there are trade-offs to each company’s approach.

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1  According to an engineer who worked on “Ground Truth”, it was a year between the start of the project and the first data releases—so this puts the likely start of the project in Q3 2008. (As a point of comparison, Apple told TechCrunch in 2018 that it started work on its map data “four years” before it began releasing it.) ↩︎

2  Sources for Google’s releases: Release #1: United States; Release #2: Canada; Release #3: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, & Switzerland; Release #4: France, Luxembourg, & Monaco; Release #5: Finland, Germany, Sweden, & United Kingdom; Release #6: Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lesotho, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, & Vatican City; Release #7: Andorra, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, & Spain. ↩︎

3  Here’s the full list of countries covered by Google and Apple after 39 months:

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4  According to Google’s press releases (listed above in Footnote #2), Google’s proprietary map data included road network data (including toll roads and bridges), address data, park boundaries, water bodies, coastline detail, cycling trails, walking paths, ferry lines, and university campuses. It also included POIs and building footprints in select areas. ↩︎