Back when TechCrunch first revealed that Apple was “rebuilding Maps “from the ground up” (in June 2018)...

...there were hints that an Apple Maps redesign was coming:¹

The new version of Apple Maps will be in preview next week with just the Bay Area of California going live. It will be stitched seamlessly into the “current” version of Maps, but the difference in quality level should be immediately visible based on what I’ve seen so far... What you won’t see, for now, is a full visual redesign. “You’re not going to see huge design changes on the maps,” says Cue. “We don’t want to combine those two things at the same time because it would cause a lot of confusion.”

And a followup piece, published later that day, made the hints even more explicit:

Maps is not getting a visual “overhaul” yet (it was implied that it will eventually) but you’ll notice differences immediately.

Together, these quotes seem to suggest that Apple was either planning or already working on its 2021 redesign back in June 2018.

But if you look closely at the photos included in TechCrunch’s report, you’ll notice that elements of the redesign were already there, back in 2018. For instance, this is how the area just north of Apple Park appears today on the currently shipping version of Apple Maps:

And here’s a photo of that same area from TechCrunch’s report:

If you look closely, you’ll notice that the shapes and the colors of the roads look very different between TechCrunch’s photo and today’s version of Apple Maps. For instance, Apple’s current map doesn’t show the circles and cul-de-sacs that TechCrunch’s does:

But if compare TechCrunch’s photo with Apple’s redesigned map, you see quite a resemblance:

This suggests that Apple’s redesign was at least three years in the making.

And it also dispels the notion that some aspects of Apple Maps’s redesign (e.g., the real-world road shapes and widths) were “borrowed” from Google, as some hot takes published in the days after Apple’s announcement have insinuated:²

In other words, Apple had been working on the real-world road shapes and widths for at least two years before Google announced last August that it was adding a similar feature to Google Maps.

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1  These statements have always seemed at odds with how Apple later described the rollout of its new map data. For instance, Apple told TechCrunch in 2018 that it wasn’t going to redesign its map at that time because it would be “confusing” to users to ship a redesign alongside new map data. And yet whenever Apple rolled out its new data, it seemed to always frame it as a “redesign”?

For instance, users often received notifications like the one below upon the new map data being expanded to their area:

And upon rolling out its new map data to all of the continental U.S., Apple once again labeled it as a “redesign”:

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2  While you could make a decent case that several recent Apple Maps features are borrowed from or inspired by Google Maps (e.g., Look Around, Guides, cycling directions, AR navigation, etc.), you could make an equally persuasive case that Google has also been borrowing from Apple (e.g., landmark icons, vegetation, detailed landcover, sidewalks, traffic lights, etc.). ↩︎