The problem is you can’t regulate interoperability where it doesn’t exist.
What does it mean to open the “default map app”? Maps apps typically act a native rendering for a web site, and have their own web-parameter based API for locations, navigation, and points of interest, as well as customizing informational layers.
So if I set say Bing maps to be the default map app, does that mean:
2. Bing Maps reverse engineers as much as possible of the various other mapping products and tries to support them with roughly equivalent features or error messages?
What the default maps app setting Apple created does is create an entirely new URI scheme of geo-navigation and an entitlement for apps which wish to support it to be the default map app. This appears to be roughly limited to a subset of parameters common between Apple and Google Maps.
So this setting in the EU and Japan.. mostly does nothing currently. Every developer needs to change their native apps and web pages to call out to this new custom scheme that only works on Apple platforms. Each of these mapping apps needs to support this scheme. That hasn’t happened yet.
The EU (and in this case Japan) gets early access and the potential exposure of multiple breaking revisions.
It is also certainly possible that a good number of web/app developers decide they don’t _want_ to support multiple mapping apps, since they’ve only verified one or two of them actually provide proper navigation/visualization/POI, and that the whole concept is flawed.
What does it mean to open the “default map app”? Maps apps typically act a native rendering for a web site, and have their own web-parameter based API for locations, navigation, and points of interest, as well as customizing informational layers.
So if I set say Bing maps to be the default map app, does that mean:
1. The OS hijacks attempts to link to sites such as Google Maps (https://maps.google.com) and Apple Maps (https://maps.apple.com) and send them to Bing Maps instead?
2. Bing Maps reverse engineers as much as possible of the various other mapping products and tries to support them with roughly equivalent features or error messages?
What the default maps app setting Apple created does is create an entirely new URI scheme of geo-navigation and an entitlement for apps which wish to support it to be the default map app. This appears to be roughly limited to a subset of parameters common between Apple and Google Maps.
So this setting in the EU and Japan.. mostly does nothing currently. Every developer needs to change their native apps and web pages to call out to this new custom scheme that only works on Apple platforms. Each of these mapping apps needs to support this scheme. That hasn’t happened yet.
The EU (and in this case Japan) gets early access and the potential exposure of multiple breaking revisions.
It is also certainly possible that a good number of web/app developers decide they don’t _want_ to support multiple mapping apps, since they’ve only verified one or two of them actually provide proper navigation/visualization/POI, and that the whole concept is flawed.