Apple has secretly removed a nice feature from Maps and that is quite a shame. But which function has disappeared?
Cool feature disappeared from Apple Maps: this is what’s going on
Apple Maps included a nice extra feature called Flyover. This allowed you to make a virtual kind of drone flight over a number of cities and sights in 3D on your iPhone, iPad and Mac. You floated past buildings and could look around freely. Zooming in and out was also possible and you could even adjust the perspective.
The feature was available at iconic places such as the Statue of Liberty in New York, the Colosseum in Rome and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. But not only sights, but also entire city areas had been worked out in detail.
Unfortunately, this feature is now gone in Apple Maps. Interestingly enough, the feature has been away for a while, since the introduction of iOS 26 a few months ago. But haven’t noticed it before.
Apple introduced Flyover city tours in 2014, along with iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite. The existing Flyover footage was used to create an automatic sightseeing flight. In many cities where Flyover was available, you could then start some sort of tour function. In the Netherlands, Rotterdam was the first city where this function became available.
For Flyover, Apple uses footage collected from small aircraft, capturing cities and buildings from above. 3D models were built from these recordings, so that you could, as it were, fly past buildings in Apple Maps and view them from different angles.
However, Flyover was not available everywhere. In some regions, the feature (or required footage) was not offered due to privacy and security reasons, or simply because suitable 3D coverage had not yet been created. As a result, it could differ per country or city whether you can use Flyover.
You can still view a place in 3D in Apple Maps. But no more detailed Flyover function. It remains to be seen whether Apple will bring the function back in a modified form in the future.
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