Big Look Around expansion for Japan but no new maps in sight

Apple rolled out Look Around expansions in Tokyo, Chiba, Shizuoka, Kyoto and Osaka on 2023-05-12 for all of the public roads in those prefectures, the very first ‘completely mapped’ by Apple prefectures, along with capital city or select city and district additions for Aichi, Hyogo, Gunma, Okayama, Fukuoka ~~and Kumamoto~~ prefectures.

This is the largest Look Around expansion in Japan since the August 2020 ‘Tokyo Olympics’ kickoff launch. Yet redesigned ‘New Maps’ with Apple proprietary cartography seen in America and recent European rollouts remain an elusive goal after five years of Apple Maps image collection. There has been considerable online discussion about when redesigned Apple Maps are coming to Japan, but discussions are a waste of time when people have no idea how much is actually mapped at this point. Even Justin O’Beirne initially listed Japan as a 2023 new maps candidate then wised up and removed it.

People assume entire prefectures have been mapped when this is not the case, easy to do if you don’t live here and imagine that Japan is a small, easy to map island country. You can only appreciate how big Japan is and how circuitous the roads are by driving them.

Apple’s bumpy image collection effort
Apple has a simple formula for image collection in Japan: Cities + Districts = Prefectures. They don’t bother with other classifications (prefectures, villages, towns, etc.), only cities and districts. Apple starts with select key cities in a prefecture then gradually adds less populated cities and districts over several mapping seasons until an entire prefecture is mapped. But Apple’s image collection effort is limited compared to Google as they do not map roads classified as ‘private’ when in reality they are a semi-private~semi-public gray area.

The entire Apple Maps Image Collection 2023 schedule for Japan was pulled just as it was due to start on February 1 then reposted in early March with new dates running three months shorter than the original schedule and a new collection area covering all unmapped sections of Aichi Prefecture. Yamanashi Prefecture is also on the schedule and will be the first prefecture Apple is mapping in one season (March~October 2023). Perhaps this is a new faster paced image collection strategy, we shall see.

To explain the situation, I have come up with (what else?) a map that hopefully clearly shows the piecemeal image collection in easy to understand terms of what’s mapped and what’s not. Highlighting every city and district is way too much detail so I chose color coded prefectures in 3 categories:

Mostly Mapped Prefectures
‘Mostly mapped’ not ‘completely mapped’ because Apple only maps public designated roads (city, district, prefecture, national). In Japan there are lots of publicly used local community maintained roads designated as ‘private roads‘ that Apple does not map (nearly 40% of all roads in my city), but Google Maps does. This means there are significant dead spots in areas ‘completely mapped’ by Apple Maps image collection vans and backpacks and this has lots of implications not only for redesigned map cartography, Look Around, AR Walking Directions, etc., but overall quality and usefulness.
Partially Mapped Prefectures
Major metropolis areas that include surrounding parts of multiple neighboring prefectures: Greater Tokyo (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba, Ibaraki), Greater Osaka (Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Shiga, Hyogo), Greater Nagoya (Mie). For some reason Apple has not mapped traditional greater area region prefectures like Gifu (Greater Nagoya) and Wakayama (Greater Osaka).
Selectively Mapped Prefectures
Capital cites in Hokkaido, Miyagi, Niigata, Ishikawa, Ehime, Kumamoto prefectures. Capital and/or select cities in Okayama, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Kagawa, Mie, Tochigi.

As the graph clearly shows, Apple Maps image collection in Japan has a long way to go: by the end of 2023 out of 47 prefectures, 9 will be completely mapped, 3 will be partially mapped, 13 selectively mapped, 22 will remain completely unmapped. The gradual expansion means redesigned proprietary New Maps and the services connected with them, detailed 3D city views, etc., are not coming in 2023, 2024 or even 2025, not unless Apple greatly accelerates its image collection pace. Those features cannot happen until Apple image collection vans map all of Japan, including private roads as Google does. If New Maps and the features that depend on them magically appear before the image collection job is done, it will mean one thing: the map data isn’t Apple’s and isn’t proprietary. They have to get the missing pieces from someone.

Apple Maps in Japan are stuck with 3rd rate GeoTechnologies supplied cartography and will be for some time to come. Pretty looking online map details don’t match the ground truth the further outside of metropolitan areas you travel. In short, Apple Maps in Japan has been, and will remain, the all bets off outliner for redesigned maps and associated features.

Not that it matters much for iPhone users in Japan: 80% of Japanese iPhone users don’t use Apple Maps. Mind share and market share has long been dominated by Google Maps and Yahoo Japan Maps. That is not going to change. Take the current state of Look Around for example. Say you are a real estate business and you link available houses and rental apartments with an online mapping service. With Google Maps you are assured that potential buyers can use Street View to examine everything because Street View covers all areas including private roads. Not so with Look Around.

For business users Apple Maps is, at best, a secondary consideration. Apple Maps Business Connect will be a tough sell in Japan when so many potential business locations are literally off the Look Around map. Until things change in a big way, going with Google Maps for business is a no brainer.

2023-04-28 Update
Apple updated existing pre-expansion Look Around areas with 2022 image data, including backpack images of station areas. Re-mapped driven areas appear to be limited to central areas and underground roadways such as the Yamanote Expressway. New features include:

Look Around in-station areas
Main stations now include backpack collected images for station entrance areas (outside the transit gates) and connecting corridors to shopping areas and stations, but no station indoor maps or AR directions. This first appearance of indoor Look Around images in Japan suggests more is coming: the current implementation is hard to use as it does not have the ability to switch between layered above and below ground Look Around views. Lots of backpack image collected underground stations mapped in 2022 have yet to appear.

POI Look Around
Look Around areas with Point of Interest (POI) labels as also expanded to most Look Around JP areas incorporating 2022 collected images but is mostly limited to central areas in Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka. Tokyo for example is mostly limited to wards ‘inside’ the Yamanote Line. Look Around #2, #3, #4 (Hiroshima, Niigata, Sapporo, Kanazawa, etc.) also have POI Look Around in central areas. Look Around areas without business POI labels have limited navigation POI labels for major bridges, roads, stations and other important navigation landmarks.

2023-05-12 Update
Apple is rolling out the Look Around #5 expansion. All of it seems loaded but not fully optimized. Shizuoka expansions are not showing as available, for example, even though Look Around views can be seen by zooming in from adjacent Look Around areas.

2023-05-15 Update
Kumamoto City Look Around has been taken offline, there was a large hole in the central famous Kumamoto Castle area that needed to be fixed. As with the Shizuoka additions, it may take a while before optimizations and the rollout are completed and available.

The gallery below shows new Look Around views.

Nagoya 2022 backpack image collection shows station outlines

Look Around #1 August 2020: Greater Tokyo, Greater Osaka, Greater Nagoya
Look Around #2 January 2021: Fukuoka City, Hiroshima City, Nara (Greater Osaka), Takamatsu City
Look Around #3 May 2021: Sendai City, Kanazawa City
Look Around #4 May 2022: Sapporo City, Niigata City, Shizuoka City, Akashi City
Look Around #5 May 2023: Tokyo Metropolis including Tokyo Islands, Chiba Prefecture, Shizuoka Prefecture, Kyoto Prefecture, Osaka Prefecture, Maebashi City, Takasaki City, Okayama City, Kita-Kyushu City, ~~Kumamoto City~~ (Kumamoto City was in the initial rollout but pulled 3 days later for quality problems and is currently being remapped)

2022 mapping season: the basis for Look Around #5 expansion in 2023

The original Apple Maps image collection Japan schedule for 2023 posted in January, pulled, then reposted 2023-03-30 with new collection dates (March 30~October 30) and new collection areas for Aichi Prefecture. In July 2023 Kumamoto City was added to the list to remap and fix problems from the 2022 image collection. This will be the basis for Look Around #6 expansion in 2024.

Recent Apple Maps posts
When will Japan get Apple’s new map? Part 1: the map supplier problem
When will Japan get Apple’s new map? Part 2: the private rode problem
Big Look Around expansion for Japan but no new maps in sight

iOS 16 Apple Maps Quick Look

In 2018 Eddie Cue said, “We have been working on trying to create what we hope is going to be the best map app in the world, taking it to the next step. That is building all of our own map data from the ground up.” After 10 years of Apple Maps, 7 years of rebuilding it and 3 years after the all-new map launch…are we there yet?

As I said last year, reviewing Apple Maps is impossible because it’s a very different service in different regions, with Japan an outliner in many ways. All that follows is from a Japanese market perspective that does not apply to using Apple Maps in other places.

In the run up to WWDC22, the Apple Maps team rolled out new features:

AR Walking Directions and Refine Location for Kanto, Nagoya and Kansai locations covered by Look Around.
Look Around expansion covering Niigata, Shizuoka, Sapporo and Akashi city areas.

If there is one Apple Maps take away from WWDC22 it was the focus on Apple Maps services and leveraging Apple created, Apple proprietary Look Around and detailed 3D city experience in developer apps. For developers using MapKit there is a lot of new stuff to access all new map details. They have access to the entire Apple Maps stack and can incorporate Look Around and the detailed 3D city experience in their apps.

Apple also has a new web service called Apple Maps Server that allows 3rd party app backends to do georelated searches directly with the Apple Maps Server which promises to increase performance instead of wasting mobile bandwidth and battery. It seems like a small step but I’m intrigued if Apple has bigger Apple Maps Server plans later on. Also this:

Old is New
What’s on the slate for the iOS 16 Maps app? With the focus on services i.e. features Apple can add without a new app, not much. We have a refreshed Maps UI that adds multi-stop routing with much better start point~destination point selectors, and condenses various route and guidance options into a single slide-able menu selection row.

For some bewildering reason Apple touts transit cards and fares in Maps as new. They are not. The features have been there since the October 2016 iOS 10.1 Apple Pay Suica launch update, they also come with the same old limitations in iOS 16, like ignoring your transit cards installed on Apple Watch. And it won’t work with transit cards that don’t support Wallet recharge, like Ventra and HOP. Apple is either hard up for showcasing new Maps features or it counts as new because it is new for America.

In field tests there are some nice new little touches. Walking directions now include elevation information, Point of Interest (POI) cards are better arranged, Siri suggestions seems a little more with it (the new high quality Japanese voices are nice too).

I was hoping for some tweaks to transit directions with better transfer and final destination notifications but there is no apparent change from iOS 15, and transit directions remain hopelessly lost on subway routes. No changes either for Japanese cartography and Japan focused Guides remain English language only.

In sum it will be a quiet Apple Maps year for Japanese users. The iOS 16 UI tweaks are nice to have, Look Around will get the new extensions currently being mapped (minus private roads), maybe Real-Time Transit will get real. Definitely no new maps for Japan and the big indoor station mapping effort remains a mystery. Perhaps we’ll find out what Apple is up on that front at WWDC23, but that’s another story for another time.

iOS 16 Apple Maps Gallery (b1)

iOS 16 Apple Maps doesn’t add new functions outside of multi-stop car routes, but the UI is improved for easier option selection, walking directions also now include elevation information

The WWDC22 Keynote Apple Maps segment billed add transit card and low fare warning as ‘new’.

The Point of Interest card UI is tweaked and more compact.

June 2022 feature availability for Japan

When will Japan get Apple’s New Maps? Part 2: the private road problem

In part 1 we examined Apple Map Japan Image Collection for 2022 and concluded that all of Tokyo, Chiba, Kanagawa, Kyoto and Osaka prefectures will have been ‘completely mapped’. But this isn’t really true: yes official public roads will have been mapped but not private roads…and there are lots of those.

If you examine the current coverage of Look Around in Tokyo carefully you’ll notice lots of holes, many side streets are not mapped. These are private roads. Private roads in Japan look just like regular roads, and are used like regular roads but they are owned and paid for by the residents who live there. It is a traditional cultural institution of local community building before there was a local government to take care of such things. It’s also one of the reasons why undergrounding is difficult to do even on public roads as utility poles are ‘owned’ by the residents.

When the private road is a thru street connecting public roads, it’s really more of semi-private community road, and the area residents who “own” it as a collective get tax cuts or local government subsidies to help cover road maintenance.You can usually tell a private road from official ones as they have no pavement markings or signs. Everybody uses them and they are ubiquitous. In Tokyo/Suginami City where I live, the breakdown of Suginami roads is as follows:

Road type	km	%
Total All (Public~Private)	1,107.4	100
Public (National, Tokyo Metro, local city)	688.7	62.2%
Private	418.7	37.8%

Suginami City

What Apple had done in Japan for their Image Collection is only map public roads, and not all of the those either as I spot a few missing ones in Suginami City. The general rule of thumb is that narrow side roads in older cities and neighborhoods are private roads. It’s safe to assume that Apple Image Collection vans have only mapped 60%~70% of the cities they have traveled. Google Maps Japan, has you would expect, have extensively mapped private roads.

What are the implications? Can Apple launch new maps or detailed city experiences for with only 60~70% of the total road area mapped? I doubt it. They’d have to get the missing data from somewhere and Apple’s go to map data supplier GeoTechnologies certainly isn’t up to the job. Believe me, they are not. Apple Maps Japan will gradually get more Look Around, but new maps and detailed city experience won’t be coming soon, if ever, not unless Apple tackles their Japanese private road mapping problem.

The 1st Apple Image Collection in Japan, March~October 2019, the Look Around launch areas

Apple Image Collection in Japan, February~November 2022,

When will Japan get Apple’s new map? Part 1: the map supplier problem

Now that new maps for France and New Zealand are in final public testing and almost certainly to be mentioned at WWDC22, there is speculation that Japan is next in line for Apple’s “built from the ground up” new map.

In my opinion, we must not forget Japan. Moreover, I find it difficult to understand the situation in this country. Certainly, Apple has updated this country with very accurate third-party data but it remains a very important country for Apple and still does not have the new map data. So, my list of countries will be Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein or Sweden.
Reddit user/Apple Maps subreddit

After all, Japan is high on Justin O’Beirne’s list of countries that Apple cares about:

This suggests that Apple’s expansions over the next couple of years are likeliest to include Austria, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and smaller countries immediately neighboring them.

With Germany, Singapore, France and New Zealand out of the way is Japan really next in line? Based on Apple’s image collection effort in Japan so far the short answer is no, maybe never…at the current pace. Indeed the situation is difficult to understand.

Image collection in Japan kicked off seriously in April 2019 with the big 1st wave covering cities in the Kanto region (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba, Saitama, Ibaraki) Nagoya region (Nagoya City with a tiny bit of Mie prefecture) and the Kansai region (Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Hyogo, Shiga). Mapped cities are listed in the screenshots below. These were the regions of the Look Around Japan launch on August 5, 2020 JST.

The 1st Apple Image Collection in Japan, March~October 2019

At the time Apple Maps showed a splash screen announcing new features for Japan: Look Around, Improved Map, Landmarks

Indeed the cartography was improved, especially in park areas that finally showed paths and other details instead of big green blobs. However, as Justin O’Beirne pointed out, improved map for Japan was only improved cartography of Apple’s primary map data provider Increment P (IPC), not Apple’s new map (confirmed at WWDC21). Apple was doing a better job with IPC Map Fan data but why did they put so much effort into a short term solution? The answer: the 2020 Tokyo Olympics that were originally scheduled July 25~August 9 before COVID hit.

People outside of Japan think Apple’s 3rd party map data for Japan is “very accurate”, but Japanese do not and neither do I. IPC was sold by Pioneer to a hedge fund in 2021. They changed the company name to GeoTechnologies, stuffed the board with cushy director positions and now market the awful click-bait for points Torima app. The focus of the company is clearly leveraging assets, not building them.

The hallmark of GeoTechnologies map data is the blocky ‘swiss cheese’ look of rural areas and the sloppy mismatched cartography of areas mapped at different intervals badly spliced together. Rivers disappear and reappear, wide roads suddenly become goat paths then roads again, half towns disappear along a mapped region ‘fault lines’. Many problems, never fixed.

GeoTechnology map data is extremely buggy outside of metropolitan areas

Nevertheless the Apple image collection beat goes on with annual mapping sweeps, all for Look Around, now also for AR walking guidance. The 2020 run mapped extensions for Hiroshima, Sendai, Takamatsu and Fukuoka cities, the 2021 run mapped the just released exertions for Sapporo, Niigata, Shizuoka and Akashi cities. The 2022 run is the most extensive yet, half refresh of 2019 mapped areas and half new with Okayama, Kita-Kyushu and Kumamoto cities being mapped for the very first time. Unlike the early runs, the later mapping runs are covering entire listed cites instead of limited central areas.

By the end of 2022 Apple will have completely mapped 5 prefectures: Osaka, Chiba, Shizuoka, Kyoto, Kanagawa, and Tokyo Metropolis. It’s very odd that Apple is mapping huge swathes of rural Shizuoka ahead of important population areas like greater Nagoya. I lived in the central Shizuoka region for 10 years and cycled everywhere. The Shizuoka mapping priority to cover so much rural area doesn’t make sense. Whatever the reasons, we have 6 prefectures in 4 years…1.5 prefectures a year with 41 prefectures to go. That means Japan will be completed mapped and ready for new map in 2049.

In other words, unless things change in a big way, Japan will remain the Apple Maps outliner it is now and new map will remain elusive as Apple’s map label for the Sea of Japan.

Comparing Apple Maps JP Look Around pedestrian additions

Hiroshima 2021 pedestrian image collection points

One of the side benefits when digging into the mysterious disappearance and reappearance Look Around in Hiroshima back in March 2021 was that I copied the links for listed pedestrian image collection points for March 2021~October 2021. The links are neat in that they preciously show what map points were collected. The links can no longer be accessed from the Image Collection page but still work.

Most, but not all, of the pedestrian image collected areas were added to Look Around recently. Public places such are as parks are there, but university campuses, shrines and temples are not. Shinto Shrines and Buddhist temples are officially public property in same category are parks but it’s not clear why Apple does not include there in Look Around when Google Maps includes them in Street View. Another mystery for another day. In the mean time have fun exploring Look Around in big grassy areas in river parks:

Miyagi
Sendai
Tomiya

Tokyo
Shinjuku
Chiyoda
Machida

Kanagawa
Yokohama
Fujisawa
Zushi
Yamato

Ishikawa
Kanazawa
Hakusan
Nonochi
Kawakita

Hiroshima
Hiroshima City
Nisogi
Hatsukaichi
Yano

Fukuoka
Fukuoka City
Kasuga
Itoshima
Kasuya-gun

Kagawa
Takamatsu
Sanuki