Update:Â Apple confirmed the acquisition.
Apple, which has already acquired a variety of companies to help its Maps team, appears to have recently purchased San Francisco-based GPS company Coherent Navigation. The company was founded in 2008 by a pair of engineers from Stanford and Cornell. While Apple and Coherent Navigation have yet to confirm the acquisition, several pieces of evidence support the idea.
Coherent Navigation CEO Paul Lego and cofounders William Bencze and Brett Ledvina all recently updated their LinkedIn profiles to show that they have taken a role at Apple, MacRumors noticed. Lego says that he is now a member of the Apple Maps team, while Ledvina and Bencze note that they are in location engineering positions.
Coherent Navigation’s website was taken offline recently, as well. the name servers for the company’s domain were also recently changed to point at Apple’s, further supporting the belief that the company was acquired.
At this point neither Coherent or Apple have commented on what the new hires are working on at the company. While independent, the company was known for its High Integrity GPS system, which combined signals from mid-earth orbit GPS satellites with low-earth satellites to offer improved precision and accuracy.
Apple has made a number of acquisitions to bolster its Maps offering since ditching Google Maps in 2012. Apple has acquired companies such as Topsy Labs Inc. and Spotsetter. Apple has also been rumored as a potential buyer for Nokia’s struggling HERE Maps division.
More on why public transit directions got lost in iOS 8 Apple Maps
Apple acquired mapping firm BroadMap’s talent, location-infused Evernote competitor Catch
Incorporating EGNOS/DGPS type corrections to the GPS in apple devices could be really cool.
(Ground station measures difference between what GPS says is it’s location and what it’s accurate location really is, then broadcasts out the correction for your device to correct it’s own location based on the slightly inaccurate GPS signal)
10cm or better accuracy in location opens up all sorts of additional functionality.
Everyone in town (Vancouver) talks about it, and sends in corrections, but absolutely NOTHING has changed since the first day.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s time to retire Apple Maps? Good try, but there’s clearly not the effort or talent necessary for a premium mapping experience worthy of Apple customers.
I don’t think they should back out of Apple Maps because the tech revolution is still in its early phase. It will take over EVERYTHING. So in 10, 20 or 50 years time they could definitely use their own mapping service. I have no idea what the world will look in the next few decades, but I’m sure maps will play a big part of it all. So it would make much more sense to have their own mapping service just so they could have more freedom over how it works and so on.
Another issue with Apple maps is the fact that it’s not on iCloud. Sadly I don’t have the funds to purchase a MacBook â€" I live in a rather poor European country. So even though I have some portable devices, I am still stuck using a PC. And that means all I can use is Google Maps. Now, I have hundreds of locations and places saved on my Google Maps â€" good restaurants, friends addresses, etc. But they are not on my Apple Maps map. So whenever I am using my iPhone, I almost want to open a Google Maps app, so I could see all my saved locations. I would save them on Apple Maps too, but… it’s just too annoying. I can’t use Apple Maps on iCloud and it sucks!