DuckDuckGo and Apple Maps
Feb 2, 2019
On January 15th, DuckDuck Go announced that address related searches made on its search engine were now powered by Apple's MapKit JS framework instead of OpenStreet Map as they were for years before then.
This is a pretty interesting move. DuckDuckGo is a search engine totally focused on privacy and in this optics partnering with Apple makes total sense.
Following the twitter announcement, comments began flowing as of why they abandoned OpenStreet Map, an open source project, in place of Apple's proprietary Maps. Reasons may vary, and I am not saying that it was necessarily a good move on DuckDuck Go's part, what surely is true is that OpenStreet Map's servers aren't free to run, as this polite guy kept on patiently say on twitter the other day among the complaints of many.
What is interesting to me here, is that Apple Maps get out in the wild much more now, available to all for free and not just to macOS or iOS users, and this very thing could be one great opportunity. When Google Maps launched, many might have forgotten this, but it was full of errors and imprecision. What contributed to make it the excellent and complete mapping service it is now were rentless contributions from users around the world sending in feedbacks on what was wrong and what needed to be corrected. I myself had done it many times.
As of now, MapKit JS is limited, but in the future this kind of interactions and contributions should help Apple Maps quite a lot in fixing the inaccuracies it has, adding points of interests, or responding to road changes faster. I could even say this big exposition should convince Apple to develop MapKit JS faster.
We may still be far from what I was hoping back in July, but let's hope we can get there faster now.
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