We already knew ads were coming to Apple Maps. Now the company has published the policy document advertisers will have to follow, and it’s a decent clue about how intrusive this is going to get.
The big restrictions are cryptocurrency ATMs and bail bond services, which is no great surprise. But perhaps less expected is the fact that home services are banned too, with plumbing, electrical, locksmith, HVAC, pest control, roofing and general contracting are all banned outright. Medical service ads aren’t automatically barred, but Apple says it’ll review those case by case. The usual categories – drugs, guns, politics, sex, violence, anything that competes with Apple hardware – are off-limits too, as they are across Apple’s other ad platforms.
It’s a stricter line than Google Maps takes, which happily serves up sponsored roofers and electricians above the organic results. Whether that’s genuine user-protection thinking or liability-dodging is anyone’s guess.
What we don’t know yet is how these ads will actually look once they start showing – Apple’s own ads page still lists Maps as “coming soon,” and I’ve yet to see one in the iOS 27 beta. Nobody at Macworld has spotted one in the wild either. Apple has only committed to launching in the US and Canada this summer, but more regions are bound to follow soon. For once, it might be beneficial to live in the last place to get a new feature.
Given the mess ads have made of App Store search – where a single query can now return two sponsored slots either side of the thing you actually wanted – a bit of discipline in Maps is welcome, though it’s still not the future we want to see.