Apple may soon begin showing ads to iPhone users in its Apple Maps app. Bloomberg said that the timeline for this is likely next year. Mark Gurman noted in his most recent weekly newsletter that technical development is currently underway to launch search advertisements in the Apple Maps app and that we anticipate seeing it implemented sometime next year.

“Apple is set to expand ads to new areas of your iPhone and iPad in search of its next big revenue driver,” Gurman wrote, referring to the paid search results expected to be rolled out on the app.

Apple Maps ads will be different from standard banner ads seen on websites. They are supposed to function more like paid search results, in which a restaurant or business pays to be towards the top of the results when a user searches in Maps.

Developers may already pay to have their product featured on the search page in the Apple App Store. Apple News offers paid memberships for banner adverts in a few regions.

Although the iPhone is said to be a premium device, the advertising business model will expand on this system too. “I believe that the iPhone maker will eventually expand search ads to Maps. It also will likely add them to digital storefronts like Apple Books and Apple Podcasts,” Gurman said about the feature, which is a kind of similar to the search advertising model of Google Maps.

This is surprising given Apple's aggressive push for its privacy-first policy. Last year, Apple introduced a feature called App Tracking Transparency (ATT) to help customers keep track of apps. The functionality allowed users to choose and accept which apps to track them across other apps and websites. Social media behemoths like Meta and Snap have complained that the privacy change has cost them money. They are unable to give targeted adverts because to tracking restriction, which results in a lack of exact data.

In such a scenario, this advertising model by Apple comes as irony. “The company’s advertising system uses data from its other services and your Apple account to decide which ads to serve. That doesn’t feel like a privacy-first policy,” Gurman points.