So long Google, Apple seems to be building their own maps app

Apple may be looking to distance themselves even further from Google in the near future. According to some screen shots taken of a legal document within iOS 5, Apple has contracts in place to use a number of other mapping services. Companies included in the new legal section titled Map Data in iOS 5 are CoreLogic, Getchee, Increment P Corp, Localeze, MapData Sciences Pty Ltd. Inc., DMTI, TomTom, Urban Mapping, and Waze. Not all of the services offer up mapping data, but some offer crime, demographic, and school performance information, while others offer real-time traffic information based on crowd sourced data.

A while back we saw a patent filing hit the web that suggested that Apple was looking to bring crowd sourced traffic information to the iPhone. The functionality was featured as an iCal tie-in that would let you pick the quickest route to your appointments based on traffic reports. It looks like Waze (check it out) may be exactly what Apple was looking to do with that patent.

We should probably also note that Apple has recently extended their partnership with Google, so it seems that Maps will continue on, as is, for the time being.

Article Via MacRumors