Apple Maps Flyover Gets a Visual Upgrade in iOS 27

I thought Flyover was discontinued

I thought Flyover was discontinued

What they discontinued (unfortunately IMO) is the "Flyover tour" where you could click the name of a city and it would automatically take you on a "tour" of the major landmarks and whatnot.

Flyover is apparently their term for the 3D map model overview in general.

I wonder who uses this.

I do. IMO it's a cool way to see the physical details of an area. And if the textures are more realistic even better.

That’s what the new ads are paying for?

Very cool. But I’d much rather see them focus on making Apple Maps more accurate. I live in a capital city, and Apple Maps is here is riddled with out-of-date or inaccurate information. It makes it very annoying to use.

Great if the city you are interested in (live in, are visiting or just want to explore virtually) is on the list but of little use otherwise.

I really wish Apple Maps well because I'd love to use it as my main mapping app and get the fullest integration into the rest of the Apple ecosystem but even for where I live (London UK so hardly a backwater) I find Google Maps' ground truth to be noticeably better than that of Apple Maps and once you go further afield the difference can become huge.

Apple and Google already have agreements for search and now Gemini. Maps is one area where I really wish those same companies could come to some agreement whereby Apple licenses Google's mapping ground truth to augment its own data, or even discontinue its own data collection to at least partially offset those licensing fees or even enter into some joint venture agreement to create an even more complete and up to data data set. None of the major UK mobile phone companies build their own unique mast infrastructure, they all have various agreements or holding in a joint venture company to common mast infrastructure shared with one or more of their competitors and that seems a reasonable approach to build the best possible physical coverage in the most efficient way for each company. Mapping data is so critical so that mobile phone mast network is a model I wish we could see happen for ground truth data. I find it so frustrating when I can walk the streets of somewhere in Google Streetview but it isn't available on Apple Maps for instance.

I can't see any privacy issues whatsoever in doing that. If a user wants to know the address, opening hours, reviews or whatever for some establishment and that request comes from the Apple Maps app it's pretty trivial to anonymise the request with a one-time random ID when it is presented to the Google (or joint venture) back end, or since it's just a database Apple could keep a copy on its own servers in which case it has even more control.

If that happened I would almost certainly move to Apple Maps - which is probably why it will never happen because Google would probably lose a lot of users for its iOS/Apple Maps app and any licensing revenue from Apple might not be deemed sufficient to offset that loss.

Good to know but of course it might be only for a few cities worldwide