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Seems strange Apple offering this for free for other platform users. This also makes me wonder how much does it cost to run a Map services. I assume the actual
by ksec 2y ago
Seems strange Apple offering this for free for other platform users.
This also makes me wonder how much does it cost to run a Map services. I assume the actual server and bandwidth cost are negligible. But the updating and Data would be the most expensive part. But what incentive does Apple have to open this up?
- randomdata 2y ago> But the updating and Data would be the most expensive part. But what incentive does Apple have to open this up? Seems you already figured it out: Access to more data / updates. Hence the "Have a Business on Maps?" being a prominent feature.
- ikawe 2y agoOne probably small thing: Having a cohesive ecosystem where you can share links makes a map app more useful.
- InvisibleToast 2y agoI was also surprised to see that there is no cost for using Apple Maps (maybe because it's a beta?). How will this affect services like Google Maps, Mapbox, and similar providers?
- jillesvangurp 2y agoProtomaps makes hosting maps pretty cheap for open streetmap vector tiles. Most of the cost is actually the CDN bandwidth. It's not going to be nothing depending on the number of users but it shouldn't break the bank for Apple and probably is relatively low to other content they distribute (e.g. Apple TV) or OS updates. The way protomaps does this is by serving a single large file with all the map data via bucket storage and then using lambda functions + CDNs to extract tiles from there on demand. So, they don't pre-calculate the tile files and this simplifies the update process to replacing a single file. The CDN caches the extracted tiles so this is relatively cheap and doable even for small startups. So, this minimizes compute and storage. Generating the map tiles requires a bit of compute obviously but it's a constant overhead; and they have to do this anyway for their native apps. Probably the hardest part for them was building a hardware accelerated render engine for the web. Similar to Maplibre, Google Maps, etc. That would explain why it doesn't work on Firefox as well. And obviously Safari is a bit lagging with things like web GPU and WASM that I imagine would be useful for this.
- karussell 2y agoIt works on Firefox but you have to fake the user agent :)
- IshKebab 2y agoProbably to try to get reviews. I would think that is Google Maps' biggest moat.
- bouncing 2y agoApple's been kicking around the idea of adding ads to maps: https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/08/21/apple-maps-could-serve-advertising-to-users-in-2023 https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/08/21/apple-maps-could-... Makes more sense if you consider that.
- pndy 2y agoYep; considering news from 17 days ago [1], I wouldn't be surprised that Apple is trying to have own slice of ads revenue/data from maps segment [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40908310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40908310
- karussell 2y agoI fear running all these services is expensive too - not just the data & updates. You need quite a lot of infrastructure: 1. map tiles 2. satellite view 3. geocoding. Where you have several services like forward, reverse, IP2coord. Likely also different services for different countries. 4. A-B routing. Again with several services like car, bike, walking and transit. Especially transit is a completely different thing. Also traffic data requires a different data pipeline. 5. ratings / reviews 6. user data (when logged in) for preferences etc
- ProfessorZoom 2y agowell it's not like all of this is brand new, they are already updating the data for iphones ... ipads ... macs ... vision pros ...
- zeagle 2y agoA positive association with Apple would make me slightly more likely to switch to iPhone next upgrade cycle with frustrations with my Pixel.