I am one of the Embark founders. I'm no longer at Apple.

Our acquisition actually ended up with the spirit of our product living on in a way that I am proud of.

At Embark, we innovated by taking a regionally nuanced and tailored transit App and giving it scale. When Embark operated from 2008 to 2013, there were small bespoke apps and there were larger more generic experiences (like Google) and we filled a void in between.

Apple's approach was quite similar. Like Embark, Apple Maps Transit has a more regionally tailored experience than many bespoke transit Apps out there, but they're also able to bring it to scale. It's now at a scale we never got close to reaching at Embark.

If you're curious, Apple talks about their city-by-city approach in this WWDC video. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/241/

I seem to remember an incredibly nerdy and thoroughly enjoyable article about the arcane details of drawing subway lines. It was written, IIRC, by a startup that had automated the process of optimising these maps, only to have Apple launch their maps – which had brute-forced the problem by doing it manually.

Yeah it was by the Transit App guys. They do good work. Chronologically, Apple's transit maps launched first.

Well, Apple Maps used to have zero transit features and this was a major downgrade for those that relied on that feature at the time

Apple removed transit before the Embark acquisition.