Open Radar

 
3rd party transport apps are largely gone from Apple Maps. Only if both the current location and the destination are outside of the area served by Apple's public transport routing, the "View Transport Apps" button still appears.

This is a regression from iOS 9 for various reasons:

- In many cases, alternate apps could provide a navigation even though Maps app cannot and simply says "Public transport directions between these locations are not available in Maps" without a link to 3rd party apps. For instance, when the user location is in London, a destination in England (outside of London) will show this behavior.

- More important, 3rd party routing apps are not only used for public transport. In fact, a whole bunch of transport modes including "Airplane", "Bike", "Pedestrian", "Train" and "Other" can be selected in Xcode and is shown with the supported mode in Maps app (if we're lucky enough 3rd party apps are offered at all).


In our app "Streets" we use the 3rd party routing apps feature to link Street View imagery to locations in Maps which is a beloved feature amongst our users: http://www.futuretap.com/support/streets3#sv-launch-from-maps

Maps in iOS 9 got 3rd party app support right by showing these apps in a mode-agnostic manner (on iPhone behind the Share navigation button and on iPad behind the "Apps" segmented control. iOS 10 is a regression in that regard because it puts these apps back (as in iOS 8) into the public transport section and worse, doesn't show them at all in arguably the most cases.