Apple Maps

Apple Maps is the built-in navigation and local search app on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. It handles turn-by-turn driving directions, real-time traffic, public transit routing, walking directions, and search for businesses, restaurants, and points of interest, all tied into Siri and CarPlay. Apple rebuilt the app's underlying map data from the ground up starting around 2018, moving away from licensed third-party data toward its own imagery and survey vehicles, which let it add features like more accurate road geometry, detailed land cover, and pedestrian-friendly walking routes.

It's aimed at anyone in the Apple ecosystem who wants navigation without leaving Apple's apps, and it's the default choice for iPhone users unless they go install something else. Beyond basic routing it offers Look Around (Apple's street-level imagery viewer), immersive 3D views of major cities, indoor maps for airports and malls, cycling directions with elevation and traffic-aware routing, and guides curated by publications like The Infatuation and AllTrails for finding restaurants or trails.

What sets it apart is less about raw feature count and more about integration and privacy stance: routes and search history are tied to a random rotating identifier rather than an Apple ID, and Apple has been explicit that it doesn't build a profile of a user's trips. It's closed a lot of the accuracy and coverage gap with Google Maps in the US and other major markets over the past several years, though Google still has an edge in some regions and in the depth of user-generated reviews and business data.