It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

Here’s what we know for sure:

• Google Maps first hit one billion users back in June 2012 (nine years ago):

• Later that year, Apple replaced Google Maps with Apple Maps on iOS—causing Google Maps to lose an estimated 28.4% of its U.S. mobile userbase and roughly 300 million iOS users globally.

• By no later than 2015, however, Google Maps was back at 1 billion users. And in the time since, Google has repeatedly stated that Google Maps has “more than a billion users” (even during the middle of the pandemic)—without providing more specific or updated figures.

• If Google Maps had since surpassed two billion users, Google likely would’ve said so. So we’ll assume that Google Maps currently has somewhere between one and two billion monthly users.

• Apple, meanwhile, told us as recently as December 2020 that Apple Maps has “hundreds of millions” of users. From this, we can infer that Apple Maps has at least 200 million users and at most around 900–950 million users. (If Apple Maps had a billion users—or close to it—Apple likely would’ve just said so, instead of saying “hundreds of millions”.)

So all of this tells us that Google Maps has more users than Apple Maps. But we don’t really know how many more.

For example, if Apple Maps has 900 million users and Google Maps has 1.2 billion, then Google has only 33% more users than Apple:

But if Apple Maps has only 300 million users and Google Maps has 1.5 billion, then Google has five times more users than Apple—a very sizable gap:

So which is closer to reality?

If you Google Search for “Google Maps number of users”, the first result is a April 2018 survey of U.S. adults from Verto Analytics:

According to Verto’s survey, Google Maps had 6.6x more users than Apple Maps in the U.S.:

Sixteen months later, a second Verto survey showed that Google Maps was used 4.3x more than Apple Maps in the U.S.:

While we know next to nothing about Verto’s methodology, the figures in Verto’s second survey were cited in a number of national media articles, including The Wall Street Journal’s October 2020 article “The Businesses Where Google Is Biggest...”:

Verto’s figures may have also been used in the February 2020 Washington Post article “Google redraws the borders on maps depending on who’s looking”, though the source of the Post’s figures isn’t named:

With some 80 percent market share in mobile maps and over a billion users, Google Maps has an outsize impact on people’s perception of the world... Apple Maps is the second most popular among mobile users, according to estimates, with about 10 to 12 percent of the market.

If the Post wasn’t using Verto’s figures, then it’s likely it was using figures from a September 2019 RBC Capital Markets report (Digging For Buried Treasure: The Google Maps Opportunity), which estimated that Google had captured 81% of the navigation market.

That RBC report was, in turn, cited numerous times throughout the U.S. Congress’s report, Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets last Fall to support the claim that “Google dominates the market for digital maps”. Oddly, there’s no copy of RBC’s report available online.

Returning to Google Search, the first page of results for “Google Maps number of users” also lists a July 2018 survey by The Manifest, which showed that Google Maps was the “preferred navigation app” for 6x more people than Apple Maps:

That survey, however, only sampled 511 U.S. smartphone owners (and 72% of its respondents were female)—so it arguably wasn’t an accurate representation of the overall population. (But none of that stopped the survey from getting a sizable amount of media coverage.)

Meanwhile, a larger 2016 Fluent study of more than 2,000 U.S. adults found that Google Maps was “the favorite mapping app” for 7x more users than Apple Maps:

But here again, we know very little about the survey’s methodology and its sample size of 2,000 U.S. adults was extremely small.

Up until now, everything we’ve seen so far shows a 4–8x preference for Google Maps over Apple Maps. But can these numbers actually be true? After all, Apple said back in 2015 that Apple Maps was used “3.5x more than the next most used mapping app” on iOS:^{1, 2}

What’s more, the U.S. is one of the eleven countries with more iOS users than Android users, according to StatCounter:

So if a majority of Americans use iOS and Apple Maps is used 3.5x more than the next leading mapping app, then how can Apple Maps’s user base be as small as all of these surveys are suggesting?

And besides that, all of these surveys are two years old (or more). Given all of the press about Apple’s new map, perhaps a number of Google Maps users have since switched to Apple Maps?

The best hint of the size of Apple’s current U.S. user base seems to come from ComScore, which has been tracking the U.S.’s “Top 15” smartphone apps for a number of years:

Though Apple Maps is absent from the current Top 15, it was among the Top 15 a few years back in mid 2017:

And ComScore’s website still has a number of older reports online that show that Apple Maps was consistently among the “Top 15 U.S. Smartphone Apps” between September 2013 and June 2017:³

The data above shows us that Apple Maps’s “reach” generally increased between 2013 and 2017. And for the most recent months that we have historical data for (i.e., March 2017 to June 2017), Apple Maps’s reach ranged from 28.6% to 29.6%.

Looking again at ComScore’s current 2021 list, we see that the #15 app (Spotify) has a “reach” of somewhere between 29.5% and 30.4% (unlike in the past, ComScore is now giving us less precise, non-decimal percentages—so “30%” actually means somewhere between 29.5% and 30.4%)...

...so we can assume that Apple Maps’s current reach is below 30.4% (i.e., below Spotify’s)—but given ComScore’s 2017 data, likely somewhere above 28.6%.⁴

In other words, ComScore’s current and historical data suggest that somewhere between 28.6% and 30.4% of the U.S. adult (age 18+) smartphone-owning population is using Apple Maps on a monthly basis.

According to an April 2021 Pew Research study, 85% of U.S. adults currently own a smartphone—which translates to roughly 218 million U.S. adults, given the 2020 Census.

This suggests that among U.S. adults, Google Maps currently has around 118 million users, while Apple Maps has somewhere between 62 and 66 million users. So the size of Apple Maps’s U.S. user base is somewhere between 53% and 56% the size of Google Maps’s.

According to ComScore, iOS’s current U.S. marketshare (as of March 2021) is 52.6%—so this means that there are roughly 115 million U.S. iOS users.

Given that Apple Maps is only available on iOS (and not on Android), this tells us that somewhere between 54.4% and 57.8% of U.S. adult iOS users use Apple Maps on a monthly basis.⁵

But as you can see, there are a couple of limitations with ComScore’s data.

First, ComScore’s “Top 15 Smartphone Apps” list only looks at app usage among U.S. residents aged eighteen and older. From other surveys, we know that 53% of U.S. children ages 0 to 11 own a smartphone and 95% of U.S. teens own a smartphone. On top of that, surveys also indicate that iOS has 88% marketshare among U.S. teens.

All of this suggests that, given 2020 Census data, roughly 49 million U.S. minors own smartphones—and that 43.3 million of these minors are iOS users.

As we saw earlier, 54.4–57.8% of U.S. adult iOS users use Apple Maps on a monthly basis, so this suggests that Apple might have another 23–25 million Apple Maps users on top of the 62–66 million adult Apple Maps users we saw earlier—which would give Apple Maps a total of 85–91 million U.S. users across all ages.

Then again, we also know that smartphone owners under 18 are the least likely of any age group to use mapping and navigation apps (largely because most don’t drive). So it’s unclear how many minors are actually using Google and Apple Maps on a monthly basis.

The second limitation with ComScore’s “Top 15 Smartphone Apps” data is that it only reflects U.S. usage—and usage patterns are likely to be different across other countries. That said, we can still make some rough estimates.

According to Strategy Analytics, the world just hit 4 billion smartphone owners in June 2021. And according to StatCounter, iOS currently has 26.35% of the global smartphone user base. This suggests that there are currently 1,054,000,000 iPhone users—which jibes with Apple’s January 2021 announcement that it now had 1 billion active iPhones.

If we take these 1,054,000,000 iPhone users and apply the percentage of U.S. iOS users that use Apple Maps (i.e., 54.4–57.8%), we find that Apple Maps’s global user base could be somewhere between 573 and 609 million monthly users.

But again, we don’t really know if the percentage of iOS users that use Apple Maps is the same in other countries as it is in the U.S. And given that Apple Maps’s data quality is arguably strongest in the U.S., Apple Maps might have lower usage rates in other countries.

To that end, it’s worth mentioning that back in May 2018, a ComScore survey of global mobile OS users found that just 5.5% used Apple Maps:

Around the time of ComScore’s survey, global smartphone ownership was approaching 3 billion.

Given that roughly 75% of all smartphone owners use navigation apps, this suggests that back in 2018, Google Maps had 1.4 billion users globally while Apple Maps had just 124 million.⁶ In other words, Google Maps had 11x more users than Apple Maps globally—telling us that the global picture for Apple Maps usage is very different than the U.S. one.^{7, 8}

So given everything we’ve seen, it seems as if Apple Maps’s current global user base is somewhere between 200 and 600 million users—which means that Google Maps currently has at least twice as many users as Apple Maps and possibly up to 9x as many.

__

1  Others have also noticed that Apple’s numbers here seem to be at odds with some of the survey data we looked at.

Something that might explain why Apple was used “3.5x more than the next most used mapping app” is that global mapping app usage is fragmented amongst a number of regional players.

Many assume that Google Maps was the “next most used mapping app” Apple was referring to. But it’s important to keep in mind that Google Maps isn’t dominant in a number of countries with high populations and high levels of smartphone ownership (e.g., China, Russia, South Korea, etc.).

In other words, the “next most used mapping app” is likely a split between Google Maps in the West, Alibaba and Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia, Naver in South Korea, Yahoo! Maps and others in Japan, and so on.

(This regional fragmentation also helps explain why Google Maps hasn’t yet reached 2 billion users even though there are more than 4 billion smartphone owners worldwide.)

It’s equally important to note that unlike all of these other mapping apps, Apple Maps comes preinstalled on new iPhones—and that it’s also iOS’s default mapping app (and that the default mapping app can’t changed in iOS’s system settings). ↩︎

2  In retrospect, it’s surprising that Apple had data showing that Apple Maps was used “3.5x more than the next most used mapping app” on iOS given its responses to Congress last year.

For example, when Congress asked Apple how Apple Maps usage compared to Google Maps usage on iOS, Apple responded by saying that it “does not have usage data for any third-party apps”.

And when Congress asked Apple what percentage of iOS users had downloaded Google Maps or Waze over the past five years, Apple responded by saying that “Apple cannot provide the requested information with any meaningful degree of accuracy”. ↩︎

3  Data sources for the table: Sep 2013, Mar 2014, Jun 2014, Jul 2014, Aug 2014, Sep 2014, Oct 2014, Nov 2014, Dec 2014, Jan 2015, Feb 2015, Mar 2015, Apr 2015, May 2015, Jun 2015, Jul 2015, Aug 2015, Sep 2015, Oct 2015, Nov 2015, Dec 2015, Jan 2016, Feb 2016, Mar 2017, Apr 2017, May 2017, Jun 2017. ↩︎

4  Given that iOS’s U.S. marketshare was growing between 2017 and 2021, it’s unlikely that Apple Maps’s reach would’ve shrunk during this period. In other words, this is why Apple Maps’s current reach is likely somewhere above 28.6%. ↩︎

5  Another datapoint: The Verge recently published a new ComScore survey (commissioned by Facebook), which showed that Apple Maps was not among the U.S.’s “Top 20” most used iOS apps in November 2020:

ComScore’s survey suggests that Apple Maps had fewer than 43.7 million monthly users in November 2020. Then again, this was in the middle of the pandemic and Apple mobility data confirms that fewer users were using Apple Maps during this period.

(It should be noted that Apple disputes the methodology used by ComScore’s survey.)

However, it’s also worth noting that ComScore performed the same survey on Android and found that Google Maps was the seventh most popular app among U.S. Android users in November 2020, despite the pandemic:

During that same month, Google also stated that “more than 1 billion people” were “still” using Google Maps, despite pandemic-related travel lockdowns. (Together, this all seems to suggest that Google Maps’s user base is well above 1 billion users.) ↩︎

6  Apple has been strangely cagey about Apple Maps’s usage over the years. Up until January 2020, it had never provided a direct number of users and instead provided oddly indirect statistics like that Apple Maps is used “3.5x more than the next most used mapping app” and that it “receives more than 5 billion map-related requests each week”.

But then in January 2020, Apple stated for the first time that Apple Maps has “hundreds of millions” of users.

Given that ComScore’s May 2018 survey suggests that Apple Maps had just 124 million users back in mid 2018, is it possible that Apple Maps had only first hit 200 million users in late 2019 or early 2020? And is this why Apple only recently began saying that it has “hundreds of millions” of users?

In any event, notice that even Apple’s current way of describing the size of its user base (“hundreds of millions” of users, instead of a more precise number) is strangely non-specific. It all makes you wonder if Apple is trying to create the impression that Apple Maps’s user base is larger than it actually is. ↩︎

7  China, the world’s most populous country, seems a good case-in-point here. Given smartphone ownership rates and iOS’s Chinese marketshare, it’s highly likely that China has more iOS users than any other country, including the U.S.

But within China, Chinese apps are used much more widely than Western apps. Google Maps, for instance, is only the seventh most popular navigation app in China—which is Google Maps’s lowest rank in the “navigation” app category segment for any country.

All of this is mainly to say that it seems unlikely that the percentage of Chinese iOS users using Apple Maps is nearly as high as the percentage of U.S. iOS users using it.

Besides China, another good case-in-point is a group of three countries where Google Maps usage was growing 50% year-over-year between mid 2018 and mid 2019: India, Indonesia, and Nigeria. These three countries are the world’s second, fourth, and seventh most populous, respectively. And iOS has very little marketshare in each of them: in India, iOS currently has just 3% marketshare—and in Indonesia and Nigeria, iOS currently has just 8%.

So all of this helps explain why the global picture for Apple Maps usage seems to look so different from the U.S. picture.

In fact, if you perform some back-of-the-envelope calculations on ComScore’s May 2018 survey data, it seems as if roughly half of Apple Maps’s total user base was U.S.-based back in May 2018:

• U.S. population in May 2018 is 327,200,000

• 78% of U.S. population is adult in May 2018
  = 255,216,000 U.S. adults

• 78% of American adults own smartphones in May 2018
  = 199,068,480 U.S. adult smartphone owners

• May 2018 U.S. iOS marketshare is 54.4%
  = 108,293,253 U.S. adult iOS owners

• apply 54.4–57.8% Apple Maps usage among U.S. iOS users
  = 58,911,530–62,593,500 U.S. adult Apple Maps users

• 58,911,530–62,593,500 divided by 123,750,000 global Apple Maps users
  = 47.6–50.6% of Apple Maps users are American in May 2018

Perhaps this is why so many of Apple Maps’s features and improvements in recent years have been U.S.-focused? ↩︎

8  Another datapoint: in December 2017—roughly five months before ComScore’s May 2018 global survey—Ben Bajarin (CEO and Principal Analyst at Creative Strategies, Inc.) tweeted that “via our data and multiple third party sources”, the “majority of [U.S.] iPhone owners use Google Maps over Apple Maps”.

He went on to say that the U.S. was the “only market” where Apple Maps had “decently high penetration”, but even then, it still wasn’t used by the “majority” of U.S. iOS users. This seems to confirm that, at least in late 2017, the U.S. had the highest Apple Maps usage rate of any country. And if that’s still the case, the size of Apple Maps’s current global user base likely can’t be larger than 609 million users. (Moreover, this also helps explain why Apple Maps’s global usage looks so different from its U.S. usage.)

(Bajarin’s data was based on “individual surveys specifically looking at mapping app usage on a regular or somewhat regular time frame... quantitative and statistically representative of the market”. He stated that he had also seen similar stats from Creative Strategies’s partners.) ↩︎