Social media users accused Apple Maps of erasing towns in southern Lebanon amid Israeli occupation – Apple says they were never featured on the platform.
Apple Maps’s main data source is OpenStreetMaps which definitely has the villages. So it doesn’t matter when the villages were removed, someone at Apple went out of their way to do it.
I can’t really find any info on when they pull their data from OSM, but it seems their use of OSM may vary from country to country? I don’t know that there’s an easy way to confirm this one way or the other.
Apple Maps’s main data source is OpenStreetMaps which definitely has the villages. So it doesn’t matter when the villages were removed, someone at Apple went out of their way to do it.
Is that accurate though?
Does Apple Maps update from OSM routinely? If not, did they update before or after the villages were added?
I ask because many things update off OSM once in a blue moon. Pokémon Go for instance updated less than once a year.
The villages I clicked at random were added 7 years ago.
I can’t really find any info on when they pull their data from OSM, but it seems their use of OSM may vary from country to country? I don’t know that there’s an easy way to confirm this one way or the other.
Before 2012 Apple maps was based on OSM, blog post about the change: https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2012/10/02/apple-maps/
Since 2012 they use OSM on some parts of the World, you can read OSM attribution in the list of sources: https://gspe21-ssl.ls.apple.com/html/attribution.html
Mmmm I don’t see Lebanon listed on that page, though this does point towards this being a post split change.