You really have to wonder if the Apple executive team get together in a meeting room with company engineers in order to try and pinpoint apps and services that they can Sherlock with new features baked right into iOS as a stock offering.
Apple’s keynote would have caused concern for a number of companies as new features were being announced – such as PayPal, Dropbox, and Knock to name a few – but it seems that a not-yet-announced feature within iOS 10 could also bring sleepless nights to the developers behind Automatic, and many more for that matter, as it proactively remembers and alerts users to where they’ve parked their car.
Apple made a big deal about the new and improved Maps experience with iOS 10. In fact, it was one of the main focal points of the part of the keynote dedicated to iOS, and featured heavily in the top ten improvements made to the platform. One of those new features, which incidentally didn’t get a mention on stage, appears to be a handy little integration that intelligently knows when you’ve entered or exited a vehicle based on Bluetooth or CarPlay connections.
When exiting the said vehicle, the Bluetooth or CarPlay connection with the in-car device terminates and seems to invoke a notification to the device alerting the user with the exact location of where the vehicle is parked.
This can be seen in the screenshot below:
Acting on that notification by sliding across it instantly takes the user to a new Parked Car section within the new Maps experience.
That section then provides the user with the ability to get directions back to that exact spot, which would be perfect when parking in a large venue or a theme park, as well as edit the location if accuracy is off for one reason or another.
Users can also add more context to the saved location, such as snapping and uploading a photo against the parking spot, or just something as simple as adding a text note with something like “parked in car park 2, section C”.
This feature may not be particularly useful to a lot of people who simply use a vehicle for social, domestic and commuting purposes, and regularly park their vehicle in the same location either at home or the office. However it really comes into its own when you go to one of the many theme parks or popular tourist attractions dotted around the world which more often than not have monolithic car parks that are just packed with vehicles, or for that matter even airports and uber-large malls.
(Images credit: MaGNeTiX [Reddit])
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