Apple Maps to Get Native Ratings System and Photo Uploads for Places of Interest

[Ktaifan]

This is so fantastic. Not a fan of wanting to see a photo, then opening another app, especially Yelp.

 

[MacBH928]

Apple needs to make Maps a public for all service, maps is so huge for it to be an Apple ecosystem only thing. Many people will favour the more privacy friendly option versus Google's. The feedback will improve it 100%.

Also, from a user perspective, I find the design language hard to comprehend. They need better GUI, they need Forstall!

Apple Maps needs a free, public browser interface.

Isn't that possible already? DuckDuckGo has Apple maps as their main maps option.

 

[ipedro]

This may well be the most reliable rating system, as it only permits 1 vote per iPhone and only if that iPhone physically visited the location of the business. That’s pretty amazing. Makes it almost impossible to buy fake up-votes, or ruin a business with fake down-votes.
In aggregate, up or down is just as good as 5 star voting system, if you think about it.

Exactly this. And I like the up or down versus stars. People have wildly differing methods for giving value in stars. Some are all in with 5 stars and all down with 1 star (if only I could give zero starzzz, I would!). Others give meaning to each star. Others are more incremental. This messes up the true representation of a rating.

Thumbs up or down are pretty universal. Either you liked it or you didn’t. The volume of each will help determine whether a place is worth visiting or not. Too many thumbs down and it’s clear that place has a red flag. Many thumbs up and there’s something special. People who didn’t find the experience notable won’t bother to rate it.

 

[Dan Andrews]

I had this feature from iOS 14 beta 6 onwards. I'm in Australia. I've just noticed that it has disappeared in the GM version of iOS 14. Huge shame to see it go, it was such a great feature.

 

[MBAir2010]

Apple need to bypass YELP and their idiot posters
We cant control red tides

, idiots!

 

[mi7chy]

If Apple Maps would even have just linked to the web version of Yelp, I'd have been ok with it. I don't want the Yelp app, so I'd have to go to Safari, navigate to yelp, search for the business I just found in Apple Maps and then be able to see more than 3 pictures or read more than a snippet of reviews. (And even then it will prompt install of the app.)

I don't mind Yelp and find their reviews helpful but I just don't want to use their app.

Yelp forces its app worse than reddit, even though Yelp's website works perfectly fine on mobile.

Wait a sec. Are we looking at the same mobile web Yelp that is useless since it force redirects to app if you want to read full reviews than just the few shortened sample ones?

 

[TechRemarker]

Glad to hear, as I'm constantly wanting to fix and add info to local listings, but unlike Google Maps where it's so easy via the Local Guide Program, with Apple Maps, you have to send things into an abyss, and while they have been pretty prompt about fixing things its less transparent. But the bigger issue for things like Photos I have to upload to Yelp first and then notify Apple to pull in photos from Yelp and it's just such a process. Native integration will certainly help but only if people actually use the native integration, and that's not a guarantee. Since for things like Apple Books, while some use the review system it's very sparse after all these years compared to Amazon's which is very robust. So if people don't use it the reviews won't be good and will be a self feeding cycle. So wish they buy Yelp and integrate all those reviews natively into their own system, but imagine that comes with many legal issues, so they will try their own first.