After fifty-two days of public testing, Apple’s new map expanded to Canada on December 10, 2020:

This is the tenth time that Apple has expanded its new map since its public launch twenty-six months ago in September 2018:

Canada is the fourth country to receive Apple’s new map.

Given Apple’s testing and release patterns, Expansion #10 is likely to be Apple’s last expansion of 2020:

Apple released four expansions this year—one fewer than last year.

But even with fewer expansions, Apple covered three times more square miles of land than it did last year:

As of this latest expansion, Apple’s new map now covers 12.5% of Earth’s land area...

...and more than 440 million people, which is 5.7% of the global population:

In terms of land area, this latest expansion is Apple’s largest to date—and it’s more than twice as large as any of Apple’s earlier expansions:

But it’s Apple’s smallest in terms of population density:

Expansion #10 arrives 70 days after Expansion #9’s release:

On average, Apple has been expanding its new map every 82 days.

On December 10, 2020, Apple also released “Look Around” for most of southern Canada, including all of Canada’s thirty-five metropolitan areas. This includes the cities of Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Québec City and many more.

This is Apple’s largest Look Around release to date, and it covers more than 99% of Canada’s population.

As of this latest release, Look Around now covers more than 155 million people in parts of five countries.

Apple’s Canadian expansion also tells us a little more about how long it takes Apple to map an area.

Apple first began collecting data in Canada in May 2019...

...so this suggests that it took Apple roughly eighteen months to map Canada—the world’s second largest country by area—from start to finish.

Then again, Apple’s data collection vehicles don’t appear to have ever visited Canada’s territories (Yukon, Nunavut, and Northwest Territories)—which together comprise 40% of Canada’s land area:

These areas were never listed on Apple Maps’s “Image Collection” page...

...nor were they included in Apple’s Look Around release for Canada.

And if you closely at the more populous parts of these territories, you’ll see a noticeable decrease in the quality of the map’s road information.

Specifically, Apple appears to have lost information regarding road importance. For instance, here in Whitehorse, the main roads through town are no longer highlighted (they’re now the same size, thickness, and color as Whitehorse’s other roads):

And you’ll see the same in Yellowknife:

And Inuvik:

Meanwhile in Dawson City, the shield artwork no longer appears for Yukon Highway 9:

In lieu of driving the area with its data collection vehicles, Apple appears to instead be relying on iPhone probe data to map the road network here. For instance, notice that Apple has added a bridge across the Yukon River here in Dawson City:

The bridge that Apple added, however, doesn’t exist:

So it seems that Apple is getting iPhone probe data from those riding the ferry across the river and interpreting it as a “road”.

If that’s the case, it also helps explain why so many roads have been downgraded in importance. Given how lightly many of the roads in Canada’s territories are traveled (compared to the rest of Canada), Apple’s probe data is likely indicating that they’re unimportant. Hence, the downgrades.

Another possibility is that Apple is actually detecting the ice bridges that sometimes form in this area during the winter months.

The 2019–2020 winter was the first time since 2016 that conditions had allowed an ice bridge capable of supporting vehicular traffic to form. And as of December 11, 2020, another ice bridge is being established for the 2020–2021 winter.

All of that said, the path of the “bridge” Apple added does seem to closely follow/mirror the path of the ferry line shown on Apple’s map.

Apple has not yet announced where it plans to expand next.

However, given past patterns and other hints and clues, Apple is most likely to expand next to the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, and Andorra), the Italian Peninsula, or Australia:

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1  Another possibility is that Apple is actually detecting the ice bridge that existed for a few months during the 2019–2020 winter. (The 2019–2020 winter was the first time since 2016 that conditions had allowed an ice bridge capable of supporting vehicular traffic to form.)

As of December 11, 2020, another ice bridge is being established for the 2020–2021 winter. ↩︎