Close to a year and a half after Apple acquired PlaceBase - a mapping software developer, the company may finally be looking at building an in-house navigational software application; something that we have been anticipating for a while.
The Apple job board has a number of new openings for iOS engineers who have experience working on navigational software.
In the posting, Apple explains that the new position will require engineers with "valuable knowledge" in "Computational Geometry or Graph Theory" and "Experience developing navigation software". Apple is noted to be hiring four engineers for this position in their iOS development team.
The job postings could be an indication of Apple's plans to bring personal navigation software to the iOS platform. The company has so far relied on its partnership with Google to provide mapping applications to iPhone users. However, the growing rivalry between Google and Apple in the mobile space could make this partnership unviable in the long term. Apple's acquisition of PlaceBase in July 2009 and a subsequent purchase of Poly9, a Canada based map development firm have given us sufficient proof for Apple's long term plans. The latest job posting could hence confirm these speculations.
Interestingly, the latest job openings require engineers with experience in "Linux server-side development of distributed systems". It is worth noting that another job posting from this week had called for candidates who will be working on "distributed image processing on a server cluster". While it is speculative at best, these different job postings could help us connect the dots with respect to how Apple plans to incorporate this iOS-based navigational software system.
It will be interesting to see how this rumored application will fare compared to Android's free turn-by-turn GPS system. Also, given the fact that the iPhone is one of the most attractive platforms for third party navigation apps like TomTom, we see Apple's latest move to be quite disruptive in the mobile navigational software space. What do you think?
[via Apple Insider]
I hope its fully installable rather than relying on constant map downloading.
apple might fail here. Tom Tom works perfectly fine without a hassle on my phone, now why would anyone really want to try apple’s navigation app when they’re always trying to rip off people :/ that’s just me though lol
The question is what can apple bring to the table? The make good hardward, but on the software side, what can they do that isn’t already out there. There’s already enough 3rd party apps available, and if it isn’t free why would you shell out more cash? I’m sure the apple fanboys would buy because its apple, besides that, I don’t see a need for it.
I’ll bet if it will be 100% free for all iphones.
So this way people don’t have to spend $100+ on a navigation software like TomTom.
But like others are saying they will have to bring something new to the table
if apple start to charge people for this then my self and many others will definitely switch to other phones
This is gonna kill the TomTom/
Most likely Apple’s in house GPS app will be a Google Map clone with turn by turn live instructions but nothing special really. Data will be downloaded live like in Google right now. Considering Google Map’s maturity I bet you Apple’s replacement will be sub-par.
I wish the Maps app was a GoogleMaps5 clone like on Andriod. Google maps if far better than iPhone maps