On September 10, 2021, Apple released Look Around for all of Italy and San Marino:

Meanwhile back in June, Apple released Look Around for all of Spain and Portugal:

And late last year, Apple released its largest Look Around area to date—which covered more than 99% of Canada’s population:

So Look Around now fully covers four countries (Italy, Portugal, Spain, and San Marino) and effectively all of Canada.

But if you look at Apple’s Look Around coverage in the U.S., you’ll notice that Apple still only covers eighteen small—but highly populated—pockets of the U.S.:

And in the British Isles, Apple covers just three areas: most of Greater London and the Dublin and Edinburgh areas:

What makes this all so strange is that the U.S., the U.K., and Ireland were the very first countries that Apple started collecting imagery in, back in 2015. Apple didn’t start collecting imagery in Spain and Portugal until 2017 and Canada until 2019:

And by the time Apple had started collecting imagery in Canada (May 2019), it had already driven most of the U.S.:

So given that, why does Apple cover so much of Canada and still so little of the U.S.?

And the same goes for Italy, Portugal, Spain, and San Marino—why does Apple cover all of these countries in full, but not the U.S., the U.K., or Ireland in full?¹

What seems to be happening is that there are actually two versions of Look Around. One version has POI labels:

And the other does not:

And the countries that Look Around covers in full (Italy, Portugal, Spain, San Marino, and Canada) are all getting this second, POI-less version of Look Around—that is, with the exception of six cities: Barcelona, Lisbon, Madrid, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

This suggests that it takes Apple much longer to process the Look Around imagery that has POIs. And it’s likely that during this same processing, Apple is also extracting other features from its imagery (like road markings and real-life building colors) that are, in turn, being used to generate the new “city experience” (more on that soon).

In other words, Apple’s Look Around coverage in the U.S. and U.K. is so limited right now because Apple is likely still processing it and intends to show POI labels throughout both countries.

This is actually good news for the U.S. and the U.K. because it suggests that Apple intends to eventually offer its new “detailed city experience” across the entirety of both.

It also suggests that the twenty-eight metro areas that currently show POIs in Look Around are likely to be the first twenty-eight “detailed city experience” cities:

Notice that the first seven cities to receive the new “detailed city experience”—shown above in red—all have POIs displayed in Look Around.

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1  Why does Look Around cover Italy, Portugal, and Spain—but only a fraction of the U.S.?

At first glance, the answer seems obvious: Italy, Portugal, and Spain have a combined land area of 341,000 square miles, whereas the U.S. has a land area of 3.5 million square miles.

But what’s so odd about this is that Apple started collecting imagery in the U.S. earlier than these other countries—and yet Apple covers far less of the U.S.:

For instance, Apple covers 40x more of Canada than the U.S., even though Apple started collecting in the U.S. four years earlier than it started collecting in Canada. ↩︎