The Cupertino company likes to control its entire ecosystem by offering all possible and imaginable services. With Apple Plans, present natively on all the Apple brand's products, Apple is directly attacking the giant of the sector:Google Maps.
The two applications are ultimately very similar, but due to the Apple ecosystem, Maps is logically ahead of Google Maps, at least on Apple products. But far from giving up, Google intends to catch up with its Californian neighbor by offering new features, which do not yet exist on Apple's native application.
The price of tolls: the argument to tip the scales?
This is for example the case of toll prices, which are not identical on Apple Maps or on Google Maps. But that might be about to change. Indeed, Google Maps is strengthening and in a future update, the Google service should offer users (first in the United States, Japan, India and Indonesia) to have an estimate of the price of tolls, data that can have a big impact, particularly in the choice of one route rather than another.
Today it is possible on both applications to deactivate the passage by toll roads, but not to know how much the journey will cost us. This should therefore soon be the case, and Apple, which has just announced thathis next WWDCwill take place on June 6 could well be inspired by this idea to bring new features to Plans with iOS 16.
An ever more realistic Google Maps
In the rest of its announcement, Google assures that the details on the side of the roads would be reproduced in Maps with quite astonishing fidelity. This will unfortunately not concern the entire planet, but only a few test cities, mainly in North America.
Google explains that traffic lights will be indicated, as will the outline of buildings or even the islands present in the center of the road to create a clear demarcation between the two lanes. Latest new feature that will directly impact Google Maps users with Apple products: support for the application on the Apple Watch.
Apple Watch and Google Maps: the wedding finally takes place
Until today, the Apple connected watch was of little use, if not useless, when you use Google Maps. From now on, it will be possible to use your watch to start navigation. A very practical situation when your iPhone has run out of battery or it is inaccessible.
Google ends its press release by explaining that voice commands with Siri should be taken into account in the coming months, but that this still requires work from the developer teams. This should therefore be part of an update that will occur in the coming months.
