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Apple Explains Why It Doesn't Plan to Create a Search Engine
(www.macrumors.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024
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This sort of reasoning didn’t prevent them from building their own maps app though. It’s just that their deal prevented Apple from investing resources on building a competitor, and it would take years from the time they start until it’d be a ready product.
Maps were acquired from Saab defense division.
https://jalopnik.com/how-apple-bought-saabs-futuristic-mapping-software-5879255
Also first Google maps for IOS were created in collaboration between Google and Apple, where Apple provided it's design power and Google provided technology. I think Google didn't want to collaborate with Apple for future google maps so they break apart.
From 2012. Wasn't apple maps a huge dumpster fire back then?
Can’t speak to back then since I just got my first iPhone but I might like Maps more than Waze and certainly more that googles maps.
Maps is core to privacy and utility for their whole software ecosystem. They offer maps free to devs on iOS so they're not forced to leak a boatload of data to Google or pay big API fees. It's a built in that thousands of apps use.
Thousands of apps aren't using search.
Maybe now, but definitely not originally. Apple grew the Maps ecosystem originally for feature parity reasons, not privacy ones. That's at least a bit more similar to the Search situation.
Turn-by-turn was the killer feature back in iPhone 4S time frame, and Google refused to allow it iOS, shipping it only on Android. Apple had some geographic features (reverse geo lookup specifically, iirc) prior to this in-house and had started developing their own maps because of the longstanding tension with iOS and Android, but Apple rushed to get turn-by-turn directions out the door in mid-2012, which is partially what caused it to launch pretty half-baked. Google introduced a dedicated Google Maps app on the iOS App Store in late 2012 with turn-by-turn in response to losing millions of daily-active users to the launch of Apple Maps.
Here's a retrospective from 2013 by The Guardian on the whole thing with a lot more detail:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/11/apple-maps-google-iphone-users
Now, Apple has run a web crawler since at least 2015:
https://www.engadget.com/2015-05-06-apple-web-crawler.html
Apple has been steadily building up its search expertise for the last decade. Notably, it acquired Topsy back in 2015, which was a search engine mostly based on Twitter data:
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-shuts-down-topsy-the-200-million-mystery-laid-to-rest-2015-12?op=1
... then launched a few web-based Spotlight search integrations a few years later (which I can't find a good source for) which integrated common web searches for things like weather and news directly into Spotlight.
IMO, based on the above (and maybe a bit more), Apple's explanation in the article doesn't tell the full story. It doesn't want to build it, but it could. This is more is about Apple wanting to keep extracting the money from Google and not having to build another also-ran service to directly compete.
There's no particular reason for every app to search the web, though. There's plenty of reason for a wide variety of apps to need maps.
Maps are a broad value tool. Searching the web isn't. A web search engine is just a search engine. It's not a meaningful value add to any arbitrary developer who wants to build apps for iPhone.