When we recently touted "United Maps goes iPhone - yes, we bring our own maps." we started scoping the app, quickly running into a number of issues. Some tend to clear up, others remain. The biggest (potential) show stopper yet is open:

Will Apple positively allow a third party navigation app if own maps are provided?

Sort of a crucial question to avoid sunk cost.

Search the web. Search more. Study the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, branch over to many more documents and talk to people that claim to hear the whispers offstage ... no real-world answers. Finally sent an eMail to the legal department. Wait.

The breezy B.Y.O.M. statement given by Scott Forstall when introducing iPhone OS 3.0 still is the only information available. It could be possible to connect to a third party mapserver with the MKMapView component. Since then: silence. So either Apple is heavily working on that or something else is coming up.

As we're playing around with interface options the iPhone/Touch offers, an annoying feature of printed maps could be overcome: symbol overflow. The more POIs, the less you see.

The image on the right is taken from an app that copies conventional maps to connected devices. Barely useful yet still better than most conventional webmap services, we think.

The iPhone could do better.

Like this probably.

Like it?

BoyGeniusReport posts a screenshot from debugging menus in the 3.0 beta firmware which seems to confirm that Apple has built-in magnetometer (digital compass) support into the next operating system.

So the formula goes like ...

Magnetometer + GPS + accelerometer = you are going from HERE to THERE at SPEED x

The missing element still: B.Y.O.M. - bring your own maps.

Everybody’s free to develop GPS navigation applications for the iPhone now.
As long as everybody brings own maps.

Oh yes, we will ...!