Apple Is Putting Ads In Your Maps

I'm a big fan of Apple Maps, and I have been for a while. It's my navigation app of choice for a few reasons: Its clean UI, its convenient integration with my iPhone's calendar and contacts, and the way in which it delivers navigation instructions. But there's another reason I like Apple for navigation, and it's because the company has largely refused to clutter its apps with ads. Now, that last point is going away, as Apple reportedly plans to add ads to Maps this summer. 

The report comes from Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg, who has a long history of accurately reporting on what's going on behind the scenes in Cupertino. Gurman says that Apple's plans for Maps come as a part of a larger push within the company towards profiting off of its services in addition to its products, and it's set to start with ads within the app's search — looking up tire shops, for example, could give you a paid ad for a tire center before your actual nearest result. Apple confirmed the move Tuesday in a press release: 

Every day, users choose Apple Maps to discover and explore places and businesses around them. Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using Apple Business to create ads on Maps. Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user's search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what's trending nearby, the user's recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.

Apple already rakes in $100 billion per year from services, but the company's looking to bump that number up as hardware gets harder to build. The way in which Apple is going about this, though, starts down a very slippery slope: Targeted advertising. Apple's current legal language around ad targeting says in no uncertain terms that the company "does not construct profiles from your location," but adding ads to Maps opens up the option to serve ads based on stores users are most likely to visit — a more data-driven form of targeted advertising that Apple has long eschewed. 

Ads in Maps aren't the end of the world. They're annoying, sure, but by this point any computer or cell phone user is likely well-trained in dodging ads that appear at the top of search results — we're already forced to skip sponsored results in everything from Google Search to Apple's own app store. If this is where Apple's plans end, it should at worst be a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of app-based navigation. After all, no company has ever gotten greedy on ad revenue, right?