In recent years, Apple and Google have been increasingly pre-announcing new map features months before releasing them. This page looks back at the Apple Maps-related features announced during Apple’s WWDC 2020 keynote on June 22, 2020 and checks in on their status one year later.¹

Apple announced five new Apple Maps features during its keynote:

• New maps for the United Kingdom, Ireland, & Canada
• Guides
• Cycling directions
• EV routing
• Congestion & green zones

New Maps for the United Kingdom, Ireland, & Canada

Apple’s first Maps-related announcement at WWDC 2020 was that its new map would be released for “more countries later this year, including the U.K., Ireland, and Canada”.

Apple ended up shipping its new map for Ireland and the U.K. on October 1, 2020...

...and its new map for Canada on December 10, 2020:

Apple also released a third new map expansion—Spain and Portugal—on the day of its WWDC 2021 keynote (June 7, 2021):

Given that Apple released a third map expansion during this period, you can reasonably argue that Apple under-promised and over-delivered here.²

Guides

During its keynote, Apple announced it would be working with “some of the world’s most trusted brands” to create guides for “cities around the world”:

As of June 30, 2021, Apple now offers 1,066 guides from sixty publishers:

That works out to an average of roughly 18 guides per publisher. But in reality, more than half of Apple’s 1,066 guides have been produced by just five publishers (Culture Trip, FATMAP, Red Tricycle, The Infatuation, and Fotospot).³

Meanwhile, 40% of Apple’s publishers have produced fewer than five guides—and more than 10% have produced just one guide each. (It doesn’t appear that Apple itself has produced any of its guides; instead, it’s relying exclusively on third-parties to generate this content.)

As of June 30, 2021, the city/destination with the most guides is Los Angeles—with a total of 99 Guides available (which means that nearly 10% of Apple’s guides involve Los Angeles). More than a fifth of Apple’s guides involve locations in California.

Just thirteen cities—eleven of which are American—account for more than half of Apple’s 1,066 guides:

There are currently only sixty-nine cities/destinations that have three guides or more—and more than half of them are in the U.S.

As of June 30, 2021, Apple has no guides available for more than a third of the world’s 40 most visited cities/destinations:

As the table above hints, Asia seems particularly under-covered by Apple Maps’s Guides.

Cycling Directions

During its keynote, Apple announced it was adding Maps’s “most requested” feature: cycling directions.

Upon iOS 14’s public release in September 2020, Apple offered cycling directions in four discrete areas: New York City, Los Angeles, most of the San Francisco Bay Area, and all of mainland China (which was made possible by data provided by Apple’s Chinese data partner, AutoNavi).

And when Apple announced that cycling directions would be available in these four areas at launch during its keynote...

...it also remarked that “we’ll be adding many more cities in the coming months”.

One year later, cycling directions have since been added to four new areas: London, Seattle, Portland, and the rest of California:

Given that this is Apple Maps’s “most requested” feature, it’s surprising that Apple isn’t expanding it faster. Then again, perhaps Apple is struggling to scale some specific aspect of it?

EV Routing

“EV Routing” was the fourth Maps-related feature announced during Apple’s WWDC 2020 keynote:

Oddly, Apple seems to have never released this feature. As of June 30, 2021, it’s still listed as “Coming Soon” on Apple’s website for Apple Maps:

And Apple’s support forums have multiple threads from both users and developers trying—but ultimately failing—to get this feature to work. (One developer claims that Apple confirmed with them that the feature “does not work due to a bug”.)⁴

What makes this all even stranger is that Apple had claimed during its 2020 WWDC keynote that it had been “working with a number of manufacturers, including BMW and Ford,” on this feature and that it “would be adding many more [manufacturers] in the near future”.

But there’s been no mention of this feature since Apple’s WWDC 2020 keynote. (And it wasn’t mentioned during WWDC 2021.)⁵

Congestion Zones

The fifth new Maps-related feature announced during Apple’s WWDC 2020 keynote was “congestion and green zones”:

At iOS 14’s launch, this feature covered cities in five European countries. One year after its announcement, it has since been expanded to four more European countries:

In addition to the five features above, Apple also announced a redesigned Maps app for macOS. (Apart from a redesigned UI, the new app added Apple Maps features that had been missing from macOS, such as indoor maps and Look Around.)

And though it wasn’t mentioned during the keynote, Apple also added the locations of speed cameras to Maps.⁶ At iOS 14’s launch, this feature was only available in the U.S.—but as of June 30, 2021, Apple says it’s now available in four countries:⁷

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1  I plan to look back at Google Maps’s 2021 releases at the end of this year. (During Google I/O, Google claimed it would add “100+ improvements powered by AI” to Google Maps in 2021.) ↩︎

2  Perhaps Apple is being more cautious about pre-announcing new map expansions given what happened in 2019? (At WWDC 2019, Apple announced that its new map would cover “the entire U.S. by the end of 2019”. But this didn’t happen until January 30, 2020.) ↩︎

3  Not really sure I’d consider Culture Trip, FATMAP, Red Tricycle, The Infatuation, and Fotospot to be among the “world’s most trusted brands”, but YMMV. ↩︎

4  EV routing received a fair bit of media coverage in the days following the WWDC 2020 keynote—which is probably only adding to the confusion about its status among users. ↩︎

5  This feature (and Apple’s silence about it) is a little reminiscent of what happened with AirPower. ↩︎

6  Given Apple’s past tensions with law enforcement, was Apple trying to launch this feature as quietly as possible? And is this why it wasn’t specifically mentioned during the keynote? ↩︎

7  Even though Apple says that this feature is only available in four countries, users and readers have reported seeing it in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden. (Thank you to Benjamin Nicolini and Markus Aarstad for confirming additional countries!) ↩︎

UPDATE | July 2021

Markus Aarstad points us to a June 2021 support document on BMW’s website that says that Apple Maps’s “EV Routing” feature now isn’t arriving until 2022:

Integrating Apple CarPlay® more deeply into BMW iDrive enables customers to use a great number of functions from their car in just the same way they do on their smartphone. One notable new feature when using Apple CarPlay is that the Apple Maps navigation map is shown not just on the control display but also on the information display in the BMW Curved Display (est. available from the end of 2021). The corresponding navigation instructions also appear in the BMW Head-Up Display when route guidance is active. A special function for all-electric vehicles will be added to Apple Maps in 2022: if the distance to the destination is greater than the current range, Apple Maps will automatically plan a charging stop and modify the route accordingly.

Thank you Markus!