Finally, Apple has jumped into the Maps market and its mapping app is on the hand of iPhone 5 owners. On the other side, Google has already proven itself in mapping space and it’s far ahead of Apple in this space. It’s pretty known that mapping app on mobile devices (smartphone and Tablet) has become one of the basic commodities now-a-day. At present, ‘Apple Map’ in iPhone 5 is being lashed out for poor navigation, misplacement of locations and more. This time, Nokia also seems quite bullish towards its mapping app strategy, while Amazon has just acquired UpNext for own mapping app development.
Undoubtedly, the rise of smartphone has created a major shift in mapping/navigation searches trend. However, visitation of maps websites on desktop computers has been consistent between 95-100 million unique visitors per month, which is more than 40% of online U.S. population, for a few years now.
The number of smartphone visitors to the maps websites and apps has surged by 24% in past six months and it has reached to 92 million unique visitors figure—a monthly penetration of 83% among smartphone users.
A mapping/ navigation searches on top five search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, ASK and AOL has been dropped by 34% over the past 15 months, declined to 49.5 million in August compare to 74.8 million in 15 months back. On the other hand, search clicks to map/navigation sites declined by 41% in the past 15 months and it reached to 55.2 million in August of this year.
Of course, the decline in mapping/navigation searches on desktops is singling a significant shift in users interest. It has been noticed that a considerable number of consumers, those who relied on the desktop for navigation prior to move, are now more relying on their mobile handsets for navigation.
However, the number of unique visitors (making navigation/mapping searches) on the desktop is still impressive, but they are steadily shifting to mobile platform for map searches. Now, users are more interested in location-based searches and marketers are more focused to monetize the searches.
This time, Apple is aggressively endeavoring to fix all issues related to its mapping app. On the contrast, Google is still willing to develop maps app for iPhone because 45% traffics of  ‘Google Map’ is coming from iPhones.
