Ad the penny drops.

Not a typo. Effective today, Google has begun introducing advertising into Google Maps. This is why we have Apple Maps: because ads were the price of introducing vector maps and turn-by-turn for the iOS version of Google Maps. Apple said no, took the bullet, and the mapping solution in iOS is still recovering.

Not to say that Apple might not try to monetize its location data in some future version of iOS. Anything’s possible. But Apple is still out to sell you atoms, not bits, and as long as that’s the plan, they’re not going to give away their bits for somebody else to sell. I have no doubt that this news will drive a lot of iPhone users to give Apple Maps another look – and a year on, they might like what they see better than they did on first release.

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