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Here's Why Apple Didn't Want To Buy Nokia's Mapping Unit HERE

This article is more than 8 years old.

Apple may be planning to build cars that drive themselves. Multiple reports have said as much. The company’s operations chief Jeff Williams dropped the mother of all hints about it this week, saying the car was “the ultimate mobile device” and elevating Apple's apparent interest in automotive tech from the realms of tenuous skunkworks project. But Apple has a spotty history in mapping, and any company that makes cars with in-car navigation tech, never mind cars that drive themselves, needs some of the world’s most reliable maps.

So it seemed strange that after Nokia put its well-regarded mapping division HERE on the auction block recently, everyone from Facebook to Baidu to German carmakers put in bids for the unit, except Apple. The company with the poor mapping history and the plans to get into cars.

A bid would have made perfect sense. Apple not only needed better maps, it had a senior staffing connection to Nokia. Its current CFO Luca Maestri used to be the CFO of Nokia Seimens. And Nokia reportedly targeted Apple as a potential bidder for HERE.

Yet there’s been no reports of interest from Apple in HERE, despite the auction being unusually leaky. In fact the first round of bids which came through in early May resulted in three lead suitors, according to a source close to the talks, who added that Apple wasn't one of them and hadn't even put a bid on the table.

The reason seems to be that Apple is going its own way.

According to a report out today from 9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman, Apple has been working on developing its very own mapping database, and plans to build it completely in-house.

Apple appears intent on fixing the problems that cropped up from relying on third-party map providers. One of the reasons Apple Maps was so buggy from when it was launched in June 2012 is the fact that its data percolated in from multiple sources like TomTom, Acxiom, Waze and Yelp

By building its own geography data-set, Apple can pare down its reliance on sources like TomTom's TeleAtlas. Apple's likely vision is that years from now, we’ll have forgotten about how bad Apple Maps was, because Apple will have taken complete control of its mapping infrastructure and made it watertight.

Of course, building up a proprietary dataset of map takes years. It took HERE, which was formerly the American mapping software company Navteq, between 15 and 20 years to build up its own database. That’s why it’s widely thought to be one of the most accurate, detailed and comprehensive mapping systems in the world -- the other being TomTom’s TeleAtlas.

The question then becomes how long it would take Apple to develop its own map. With better scanning technology and a few mapping acquisitions under its belt, it could take less time than it did for HERE. We've heard that Apple has been sending a fleet of vans around California’s Bay Area with multiple cameras hooked on the roof, just like the Google cars that drive around taking photos for Street View.

Their exact purpose is still unclear, yet the implication is that the vans are Apple's prototype self-driving vehicles (which feels like a stretch), or an attempt upgrade its maps data. Google began sending its fleet of Street View cars to five U.S. cities way back in 2007 and they have continued to roam the streets globally to this day.

Eight years later, Apple is now sending its own fleet of beige, black and white minivans around the U.S. to collect map data, according to 9to5Mac — except Apple isn’t starting from scratch. In the three years since it launched Maps to almost immediate criticism, it has made a string of acquisitions in the mapping space, picking up startups like HopStop, Locationary and Broadmap, which manages and analyzes map data. Apple’s vans are reportedly intended to enhance the mapping data that Broadmap has brought into the company already.

Apple is meanwhile happy to keep licensing data from third parties, for now. Just over a week ago, TomTom confirmed it had renewed its contract to supply mapping information to for an undisclosed period of time. With that under its belt Apple won't need HERE, and it'll get more time to gather mapping data in its own typically-mysterious ways.