Via Daring Fireball, a new report from The Information suggesting that “Google Maps’s Moat” provoked some sort of change to Apple Maps:

Apple has improved Apple Maps since its troubled launch, boasting that the service is more popular on iPhones and iPads, on which it comes pre-installed, than Google Maps. But Google Maps still reaches more users because of the larger global audience of Android devices, and the quality of Google Maps often comes out ahead in independent evaluations.

One such evaluation was a blog post last year, which chronicled in exhaustive detail the richer detail available on Google Maps. The post appeared to rattle [a specific Apple executive], who ordered changes to Apple Maps to satisfy internal concerns related to the blog post, said a former Apple employee.

While “Google Maps’s Moat” was never intended to rattle anyone,¹ it would be interesting to know what changes were ordered.

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1  My motivation for writing “Google Maps’s Moat” was to encourage Apple to explore some of Google’s mapmaking strategies.

The world needs a high quality, privacy-focused, ad-free alternative to Google Maps—and I very much want to see Apple succeed in mapping. ↩︎