In May 2021, Apple began specifically disclosing the cities visited by its backpack imagery collection effort.

This is a list of the eighty-seven metropolitan areas that Apple’s backpack imagery collection effort has visited thus far (or is scheduled to visit). Cities visited before May 2021 were confirmed via shadows and reflections in Apple’s published Look Around imagery.

The thirteen cities listed above in bold are those that have received the “Detailed City Experience”.

It’s highly likely that Apple needs to collect imagery via backpack in order to release the “Detailed City Experience” for a given city. So one way to look at this list is that it’s a list of all of the cities that Apple is eventually preparing to release the “Detailed City Experience” for.

A few observations:

• Apple released the “Detailed City Experience” for Washington, D.C. in November 2021—three months after it first visited Washington, D.C. for backpack collection in August 2021. This suggests that Apple can release the “Detailed City Experience” for a city within three months of collecting backpack imagery for it.

• Most of the cities visited before March 2021 have since been revisited by Apple’s backpack collection effort—including Tokyo, Osaka-Kyoto, Nagoya, Melbourne, and Atlanta. And San Francisco was visited at least four times (e.g., Oct 2018, Mar 2019, Feb 2020, and Sep 2020). Given this, it’s likely that these cities served as testing grounds for Apple’s backpack imagery collection effort.

• Given the dates of their collection, Sydney and Melbourne are the cities that seem most likely to receive the “Detailed City Experience” next. (It’s unclear if Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and other Japanese cities can receive the “Detailed City Experience” given that Japan has not yet received Apple’s in-house map data.) There’s also a large handful of U.S. cities that seem poised to receive it next, including Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and Las Vegas.

• Similar to what we’ve seen with Apple’s other imagery collection efforts, Apple seems to avoid collecting backpack imagery during the winter months.