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iOS 14.5 Apple Maps will be able to tell you how busy a place is

Published: Mar 15, 2021, 10:32 AM

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Apple's new iOS 14 update is coming soon, and everyone's been talking about the new App Tracking Transparency feature and what it means for users, as well as Facebook's fight with Apple over it.

However, that's far from everything the upcoming update has to offer iPhone and iPad users, and we might have been letting some interesting tidbits slip through our fingers. An observant Reddit user, as noted by 9to5Mac, noticed that Apple will be adding some new improvements to its Apple Maps, which has recently grown to rival Google Maps in some ways. As of the new update, Apple Maps will be crowd-sourcing information about how busy a point of interest is, as well as opening and closing business hours.

This information will be sourced from iPhone users anonymously and safely encrypted, and will allow Apple Maps to provide live updates about the hours and busyness of stores, parks, or anywhere you may want to go. This may prove useful especially in light of the pandemic, when we need to be wary of going into crowded spaces. The Apple Maps improvement should be able to let you know just that, as well as the business hours of that low-key bakery someone was raving about and you want to visit, but doesn't have its hours published yet.

Routing and Traffic: While you are in transit (for example, walking or driving), your iPhone will periodically send GPS data, travel speed and barometric pressure information in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple, to be used for augmenting crowd-sourced road traffic and atmospheric correction databases. Additionally, when you open an app near a point of interest (for example, a business or park), your iPhone will send location data in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple, which Apple may aggregate and use to let users know if that point of interest is open and how busy it is.

We still don't know exactly when the iOS 14.5 update is to roll around, but we do know it will be sometime this month.