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Apple Look Around now available in Germany

Apple is taking the lead in street imagery in Germany

This Tuesday Apple released Look Around coverage for Germany. The service is now available in all the country.

Previously, Apple released coverage in ten cities. It first started with Munich then progressively expanded to Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Dortmund, Berlin, Hamburg and Leipzig.

Now the whole country is available. This includes cities but also rural areas that are completely left out in Google Street View. All regions are covered without exception and with high quality imagery like any other country available on Look Around.

Despite the huge amount of coverage, almost no blurred buildings can be found. This really shows how much the perception of street view services evolved since 2010, when Google attempted to publish Street View in Germany.

Contrary to popular belief, Google Street View is not banned in Germany. Google decided to not publish more coverage after getting a very high volume of blur requests. It was too expensive to manually apply the blur so Google simply decided to not publish the data to save time and money.

This new addition to Look Around gives a great advantage to Apple over Google in Germany. It will be interesting to see how Google will react. Will Street View finally come to Germany? Nothing sure, as Google may have received a lot of blur request all over the country, including places outside of the 20 covered cities. Possible that Google would have to blur more places before releasing data. Right now it is impossible to predict if Google can publish coverage in Germany easily.

As usual we will keep an eye on this and make announcements if Google decides to publish Street View in Germany. Remember to follow us on Twitter or Instagram and join our Discord server to get the latest news.