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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Aside from my general distaste for Yelp and their business practices, it is also an objectively bad user experience.

Makes me wonder if Apple made some exclusive Yelp agreement before Apple Maps launched, so they'd have good ratings data, and we have to wait for the agreement to expire before Apple can move on.

To me it would make good market sense for Apple to fully compete with Google Maps and offer Apple Maps on the web. It would give them more data to feed back into their review/ratings/business info database to further improve the mobile experience.

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Apple Maps’ ratings were announced last year and seem to be rolling out now:

https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/23/apple-maps-native-ratings-and...

I just installed iOS 15 an hour ago. So I checked to see if the new Apple Maps' ratings was in there. There is now a "Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down" button that allows you approve or disapprove of a restaurants Food & Drink, Customer Service, Atmosphere, and Overall experience. It also uses your on device location data to suggest photos that you took while at the restaurant, to include in your review. So it looks like it's finally live! (At least for some people)

Interestingly enough, it still has Yelp reviews beneath it. Hopefully that just gets removed completely once Apple has collected enough of their own reviews.

In iOS 15 it does look like you can browse more photos directly on a restaurant page before confronted with the Yelp button. So that’s an improvement I’d say.

I don’t see these buttons in Germany unfortunately.

> offer Apple Maps on the web

If they wanted to, they could easily do that. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs:

“Use this JavaScript API to embed interactive maps directly into your webpages or apps across different platforms and operating systems, including iOS and Android. Like MapKit for native apps, you can also add annotations and overlays to the map to call out points of interest or user destinations.”

However, would that really give them more data? I would guess it would get a tiny fraction of the traffic that mapping apps would generate.

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