The Google Maps Mystery ⇥

Stephen Hackett noticed something odd about iPhoto for iOS:

Whatever map tiles are in iPhoto for iOS, they don’t look like Google Maps.

Bryan Bishop at The Verge agrees:

Bringing up the location feature in the app calls up tiles that bear little resemblance to the Google service used in the rest of iOS and in iPhoto for OS X. Writer Holger Eilhard was able to discover that the tiles are in fact being pulled from Apple directly, from a server named gsp2.apple.com.

But Gruber asked and was told that it is indeed Google’s data. How very curious. I’m guessing they’re using Google’s location data, but Apple’s custom map tiles on top.