Public Transit in iOS 6
By now it is public knowledge that there will be no in-house replacement for routing via public means of transport in iOS 6. Indeed if you hold an iOS 6 phone (that somebody maybe has left in a bar) and you try to plan a route from point A to point B you find …
Context & Ripple Effects
Transit directions have been a stock iPhone feature since iPhone Software 2.2 added public transit and walking directions back in 2008, so their disappearance is a regression, not a new capability. With iOS 6 replacing Google's maps wholesale, Apple has confirmed it will ship without any in-house replacement for transit route planning, instead handing users off to third-party apps.
The handoff was flagged days earlier when Apple confirmed it was passing transit directions to third-party apps in iOS 6 Maps, and the breadth of pickup — New York Times, Daring Fireball, Gizmodo, GigaOM and others all carrying the same point within a day — marks this as one of the most scrutinized gaps in the new Maps rollout.
First-order effects
- Commuters upgrading to iOS 6 lose built-in A-to-B transit routing for the first time since 2008, and must find and install a separate app to plan a bus or train trip.
- Third-party transit app developers get an unexpected distribution opening: the default maps app now actively cedes that use case rather than serving it.
Second-order effects
- App Store competition shifts toward whoever can fill the vacated slot fastest, giving established transit-routing apps a visibility windfall at launch.
- The gap hands Google a talking point for keeping its own Maps app (and its transit data) in front of iPhone users, pressuring Apple to license or build transit datasets city by city.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform owners replacing licensed map services with in-house stacks accept short-term feature regressions — transit being the visible one — as the cost of controlling their own mapping data.
- Maps quality becomes a standing differentiator in the mobile platform contest, with each side judged not just on features present but on which ones it can no longer source from a rival.
The trend: Smartphone platforms are swapping licensed map services for in-house mapping stacks, and transit routing is emerging as the feature whose absence exposes how expensive that transition really is.