March 2025

Apple Is Showing Indigenous Land on Maps

Apple Maps now shows the borders of Indigenous land in Australia and New Zealand.

Apple Newsroom:

Beginning today, Apple Maps now displays Indigenous lands in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. By gathering information from Indigenous advisors, cartographers, Traditional Owners, language holders, and community members, Apple Maps will show reserves and Indigenous Protected Areas, Indigenous place names, Traditional Country, and dual-language labels. Indigenous lands place cards feature information about the local area and Traditional Owners, and can be curated to allow communities to add their own photos, destinations on their land, and text in their own language. Representation of Indigenous lands in Apple Maps provides users with a more comprehensive experience while also recognising the stories and significance behind them.

According to the Guardian, dual place names have also been introduced throughout Australia.

Apple Maps will now include more than 250 dual placenames for cities and towns across the country, with more to be added.

I’m struggling to confirm this. On the latest versions of both macOS (15.3.2) and iOS (18.3.2), no traditional place names are shown instead or in addition to the English names. It’s technically feasible to show two names simultaneously for a location, as we’ve seen with Gulf-of-Mexico travesty—it just hasn’t been done.

When I search for “Naarm,” the traditional name of the Melbourne area, only “Melbourne” shows up as a match. Likewise, a search for “Gadigal” or “Cadigal” returns matches in the Sydney area, like “Gadigal Station,” but not Sydney itself.

Good publicity for Apple, but a job half done.

“Overthinking about vertical writing of Hangul labels on maps”

I love a good deep dive into often-overlooked map-related challenges. Here Hanbyul Jo wonders why Mapbox chose to vertically display labels in Hangul, whether the choice improves legibility, and since when Koreans horizontally read and write Hangul instead of vertically.

Meta Transitions Basemaps to Overture

Form the Overture blog:

Meta, one of the founding members of Overture Maps Foundation, has successfully transitioned its suite of global basemaps used across apps such as Facebook and Instagram to Overture’s base data layers

It seems that this move also marks the end of Daylight Map Distribution.

The goal was to build an up-to-date, validated, global basemap using OpenStreetMap that could power all of Meta’s use cases. Daylight included validation checks designed to find and correct mapping errors, building footprint detections, lidar derived building heights, name translations, and a global land cover layer. This global dataset was made publicly available and has served the maps at Meta for the past five years.

As a founding member of Overture, Meta has been deeply involved in developing the processes that produce Overture’s published data. In fact, the very same validation processes and pipelines that were used in Daylight are also now used to produce Overture’s regular data releases.

Notice the past tense. There is no official announcement confirming Daylight’s end of life. But there hasn’t been an update since November 2024 after more than four years of at least twice-monthly releases.