I can’t tell if this is a piece of good news for Malaysian users or not, but it has been reported that Apple has dropped the use of Google Maps on its iCloud beta for the web, and replaced it with the company’s very own mapping service – Apple Maps. Currently, for all regular iCloud users, the web version of Find My iPhone uses Google Maps, a platform I’m sure most of us are familiar with.
The change was first noticed by a German blog, iPhoneBlog.de. Apart from the new choice of mapping interface, everything else in the iCloud beta site is still functioning as before. However interestingly, according to AppleInsider, the new version is a lot more lightweight – the Google Maps version transferred about 4MB of data for a single request, while the beta one uses only 400KB.
This is nothing new of course, the Find My iPhone application on iPhone and iPad is already using Apple Maps for you to locate your devices. While I’m pretty sure Apple Maps has improved a whole lot since its disastrous launch several years ago, I feel that the Malaysian part of the map isn’t as well populated. So, when Apple rolls out the new change to everybody, you can always cross check the location with Google Maps, just to be completely sure you don’t end up at a dead end or something.
(Source: AppleInsider)
