My assumption was correct: if you insert the place query, it appears that any Apple Maps URL can be viewed on the web with browsers that aren’t Safari. I assumed that reformatting the URL with the same technique would work for any place or address – not just the ones discovered from Safari suggestions as 9to5Mac reported. Notice the difference? Before the address parameter, the URL has place – presumably, a query that turns an address into a special “place” type that can be viewed on the web. In his article, Mayo provided an example of a place viewable on the web. Normally, these URLs are used as deep links on iOS/macOS to launch the Maps apps directly.

Let’s try with a generic address:Īs you can see, Apple is encoding the address and using coordinates to compose the URL. That’s the Colosseum in Rome – arguably, a point of interest. By default, Maps won’t expose the URL, but we can use Workflow’s extension and its ‘Get URLs from Input’ action to extract the URL and copy it to the clipboard.īy default, an Apple Maps URL looks like this: To share a place or address from Apple Maps, you first need to open the detail card and tap the share icon.

I did a bit of digging, and I discovered that you can open any Apple Maps place or address in another web browser if you reformat the URL properly. The purpose for these URLs is unclear, but it may possibly foreshadow a larger move by Apple to offer its own online mapping service to compete with Google Maps on the web. If viewing in Chrome or on a non-Apple device like Android, the fallback webpage is loaded. When on an Apple platform, these URLs appear to act as deep links into the native Maps app. The design is identical to the cards in the iOS 10 Maps app. The website link shows details about the place such as location, name, telephone number and reviews. Yesterday, Benjamin Mayo reported that Apple published public webpages for “some landmarks and points of interest” listed in Maps:Īpple is now publishing public web pages for landmarks and POI in its Apple Maps database: here’s one such place.

Apple maps website