With the update to iOS 9, iPhone users will find transit directions in Apple Maps. So yes, city-dwellers, we can finally stop complaining about this.
“Yes, it’s transit,” Apple’s Craig Federighi declared onstage today at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. 9to5Mac had previously reported that Apple would be reintroducing transit directions to Maps.
Federighi said Apple has taken particular care to “get the details right,” for example by showing the full footprint of, say, a subway station and helping you find the nearest entrance. As he noted, that could not only save users “a ton of walking,” but could also make the difference in whether you catch your train on time.
Other features include step-by-step directions, walking times and the ability to look at all the transit options at a given station. These directions will start rolling out in limited locations, including several cities in the United States and China, as well as London.
Federighi also noted that Apple Maps is already serving 5 billion user requests a week and is seeing 3.5 times as much usage as other mapping maps on iOS.
Apple removed transit directions when it broke away from Google to launch its own mapping app in iOS 6 — though there are other iPhone apps offering transit directions, and in fact Apple was pointing users looking for transit directions to alternative apps. (As a former San Franciscan, and now a resident of New York City, transit directions were a big reason for my switch to Google Maps.)
Back in 2013, Apple also acquired two transit navigation startups, HopStop and Embark.
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