By your logic, Denmark or The Netherlands would have been the prime location for bicycle routing to be introduced. Not only are the governmental infrastructure data sources of pristine quality, those places also see the most amount of cycling hours in the world. So they would rapidly get more data that they could fine-tune their algorithms with.
That surprised me, too. All the data probably already is in https://www.opencyclemap.org/?zoom=7&lat=52.65153&lon=8.9347... (aside: look how limited Danish cycling infra is compared to the Netherlands and Belgium)
Maybe routing is too hard on such a dense network, or it’s just that they’re an American company.
Only time will tell and we can be hopeful but a map that only covers part of any particular country is not very useful for navigation except as a proof of concept.
As it is it’s more like the 3D Tour feature of Maps. A great novelty but not useful outside of a very narrow usecase. That’s been around for a few years now but is still only available in a handful of locations.
> been around for a few years now but still only available in a handful of locations.
seems like a fairly long list though I havent monitored how often they add locations so maybe it launched with 100+ international locations.
https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#maps-flyover
Waiting to support part of the world until they can support all of the targeted regions would deprive users of data they have for, I guess, years.
So, it should be a gradual rollout. Where should they start? I would think it’s easiest in richer countries, where it’s easier to obtain reliable data, and updates thereof.
Also, denser population areas likely give them most bang for the buck (getting many happy users as fast as possible seems necessary to me when discussing the success of the Maps app with senior management)
Because of those arguments, I don’t see whether that would look much different from what’s happening now.
So, I don’t see how one can conclude they aren’t serious about the Maps app or cycle paths.
Of course, things would be different if we had data telling us they don’t plan to get large coverage, slowed down or even stopped data gathering. I am not aware of either, though. It would be nice to have a history of the info on https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability, to see what, if any, progress they make.