Look out for the Apple Maps van in Hong Kong: iPhone users to get upgraded street views to rival Google Maps

From today, Apple is sending out its vans to capture images that will provide an immersive look at the city, much like Google’s ‘Street View’ feature

To ensure privacy, data collected by the vans will be stored locally, faces will be blurred and requests can be submitted for further exclusion in the photos

Reading Time:2 minutes

Apple Maps’ “Look Around” feature was introduced in the US in 2019. Now, it is coming to Hong Kong too. Photo: Apple

Published: 10:15am, 10 May 2021Updated: 10:40am, 10 May 2021

If you owned an iPhone during its first five years of existence, you may remember that those early smartphones used Google Maps as its default maps app. In fact, Google Maps came pre-installed. This stopped in 2012 when Apple launched its own Maps services after a feud with Google over typical tech giant gripes (Apple was upset Google wasn’t sharing more location data).

The problem for iPhone users was that Apple Maps wasn’t very good, so they would go out of their way to install Google Maps anyway. Apple was quick to fix this problem in the US, and its native map system improved by leaps and bounds during its first year of launch.

Outside the US, though, Apple Maps continued to lag behind Google Maps in usability and features – but this is will soon change for Hong Kong.

Apple is, from today, sending its vans around the city to conduct a ground survey that will capture 360-degree street images to provide an immersive, panoramic ground-level look at the city for more detailed navigation.

All faces and number plates that appear in the images collected by Apple’s vans will be blurred. Photo: Apple

Apple calls this feature “Look Around”, which has been available in major US cities such as New York and Los Angeles since 2019. Last August, Japan was the first non-US country to get the superior Apple Maps treatment.