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Apple Maps app to start showing ads from next year: Report
This comes as a surprise because Apple is aggressively pushing its privacy first policy. Apple launched a feature called App Tracking Transparency (ATT) last year to support the users to keep a check on apps.
Apple may soon start showing ads to the iPhone users in its Apple Maps app. The timeline for this is expected next year, Bloomberg reported. In his latest weekly newsletter, Mark Gurman wrote that the engineering work is already underway to begin search ads in the Apple Maps app, and we should see it be implemented sometime next year.
“Apple is set to expand ads to new areas of your iPhone and iPad in search of its next big revenue driver,” Gurman wrote, referring to the paid search results expected to be rolled out on the app.
The ads on Apple Maps will differ from the traditional banner ads that we see on websites. They are expected to be more like paid search results, which a restaurant or a business will pay for turning up near the top of the results when a user searches in the Maps.
Apple App Store already has search ads where developers pay to have their app promoted on the search page. In select countries, Apple News has paid subscriptions for banner ads.
Although the iPhone is said to be a premium device, the advertising business model will expand on this system too. “I believe that the iPhone maker will eventually expand search ads to Maps. It also will likely add them to digital storefronts like Apple Books and Apple Podcasts,” Gurman said about the feature, which is a kind of similar to the search advertising model of Google Maps.
This comes as a surprise because Apple is aggressively pushing its privacy first policy. Apple launched a feature called App Tracking Transparency (ATT) last year to support the users to keep a check on apps. The feature facilitated the users to decide and allow which apps can track them across other applications and websites. Social media giants like Meta and Snap have claimed to lose revenue because of this privacy update. They can’t provide targeted advertisements because the blockage of tracking lacks precise data.
In such a scenario, this advertising model by Apple comes as irony. “The company’s advertising system uses data from its other services and your Apple account to decide which ads to serve. That doesn’t feel like a privacy-first policy,” Gurman points.
