Apple Making its Own Map App?

Google had recently confirmed recently that they are providing maps for iOS; the old rumor that Apple will make their own GPS/Mapping app has raised its ugly head again. The news this time comes via the folks at MacRumors who have dug through the legalese for iOS 5, and found reference to a number of other mapping companies. Click the break for more on this!

Stacked in a new section called “map data”, were references to the following GPS and mapping companies:

• CoreLogic offers Parcel data, which marks boundaries for of properties to provide positional accuracy in location-based solutions.
• Getchee provides location and market data on China, India and Southeast Asia.
• Increment P Corp provides location and traffic data for Japan.
• Localeze provides local business listings.
• MapData Sciences Pty Ltd. Inc provides mapping data for Australia and New Zealand.
• DMTI provides postal code data for Canada.
• TomTom offers global TeleAtlas mapping data that is also licensed by Google for their map solution.
• Urban Mapping provides in-depth neighborhood data such as crime, demographics, school performance, economic indicators and more.
• Waze offers real-time maps and traffic information based on crowd-sourced data.

The last two companies are perhaps the most interesting. Urban Mapping offers extensive additional data over traditional mapping products. The company was even a partner of Placebase’s back in 2007 before Apple’s acquisition. Meanwhile, Waze seems to be exactly what Apple was talking about when they hinted at crowd-sourced traffic data. Waze offers mobile apps that can be used to send data back to a central database to show real-time traffic data.

For the time being, it does not seem that Apple would ask help from these companies to move away from Google, but these rumors do raise an eyebrow!