Google made Maps for business customers. Apple tried Apple Maps because they didn't like the price but that didn't pen out. Apple makes everything for consumers. B2B within the Apple ecosphere is a joke. And that's why Apple Maps will never catch up - Apple doesn't want to be a database company, they want to be a consumer company.

Totally. The Google Maps API is about as B2B as I have interacted with Google, and it is a very nicely put together documentation. It doesn't have all the cool Earth Pro stuff, but it's more than enough if you ask me. They have business onboarding wizards. I mean, Google even allows you as a business to update your business information through an API.. Apple on the other hand has some things for iOS developers) and that's about it.

My impression of Street View was that it was a bonkers idea that they did anyway, and once they had all the data they found a whole range of problems that could be solved with it. The power of 'geo' is that you can glue a bunch of geo-located data points together and figure out much more out of the glued whole than out of the sum of its parts. Did you see that Google has been adding "how busy is this place" to Maps? You can see down to the hour how busy your grocery store is when you look the business up in Maps. It seems like a fun side thing, but there are companies whose entire business is providing retail and real estate with accurate data on how many people a location will have walk by, because it's such a solid predictor of revenue that commercial real estate values are heavily determined by it (over here, at least).

They figure those numbers out with costly, manual tallies and prediction models. Google hasn't explained how they do it, but my guess is that Google has accurately geolocated most, if not all wifi hotspots to physical locations by logging which hotspots people's Android phones pick up on and combining that with people who have their location services on. I'm speculating, but I wouldn't be surprised if that also started out with Streetview logging wifi. As soon as a few people have geolocated a wifi hotspot, they can then use logs from all other hundreds of Android phones to figure out how busy a place gets. It only takes a few users providing the initial ground truth, after which you can keep it updated with basic metadata logs. Just like in the article.

I don't know if you also have that, but since this summer Google has been pushing location services hard, giving me a popup every. single. time I open any location-using app if I want to turn it on. It doesn't turn itself off anymore, too. I think they want more data on walkability, since Maps is not very good at that at times, but who knows what clever things they're up to.