Apple’s iPhone Map Roadmap
A few days ago, Apple announced that the iPhone App Store had served two billion downloads of 86,000 3rd-party applications. It’s hard to remember, but when the iPhone launched in 2007, the closest thing the iPhone had to 3rd party apps was the included YouTube app, the Yahoo-backed Weather app, and the Maps application built on Google maps. Now it looks like Apple may be preparing for a post-Google world.
It came out this week that Apple quietly acquired a mapping startup called Placebase earlier this summer. The first clue was actually a tweet by a Placebase business partner in July and was confirmed when someone checked Placebase’s CEO’s, (Jaron Waldman) LinkedIn profile and found he listed himself as being on the GEO team at Apple. Placebase’s CTO also lists himself as an Apple employee. Placebase might be viewed as a mapping also-ran, but they actually launched after Google Maps debuted, and as of the summer of 2008 Om Malki reported that they had managed to carve out a profitable niche providing custom mapping with a product called PushPin that went above and beyond what was possible with Google Maps.
No one outside of Apple know’s what their plans are for mapping in general, and Placebase in particular, but there is plenty of speculation that it means that Apple is getting ready to kick Google Maps off the iPhone. That’s possible, Apple isn’t as close to Google as it once was now that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has left their board, but I don’t think it is anything like a foregone conclusion.
For one thing, apparently the iPhone Maps application has recently started showing mobile, location-targeted ads delivered by Google. It’s widely believed that this is going to be a huge new advertising market, and you can be sure Google is giving Apple a cut. Given the required scale of a location-targeted ad market, it is hard to imagine that Apple could do as well on its own as it could by taking advantage of Google’s relationships with vast number of advertisers, and given that the iPhone is the only clear winner in the web-Phone market, so far, Google needs them to provide the users to help make that ad market happen.
We’ll have to wait and see what the outcome of this acquisition is. Apple is already incredibly well positioned to capture a big chunk of the value from mobile location-based apps. They can let others do the hard work of figuring out what applications people will find compelling while taking a cut of every app store sale, a subsidy from mobile carriers, and, of course, a nice fat profit from each iPhone sold to run those apps.
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