Apple announces Apple Business, ads in Maps ↦

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced Apple Business, a new all-in-one platform that includes key services companies need to effortlessly manage devices, reach more customers, equip team members with essential apps and tools, and get support from experts to run and grow efficiently and securely. Apple Business features built-in mobile device management, helping businesses easily configure employee groups, device settings, security, and apps with Blueprints to quickly get started. In addition, customers can now set up business email, calendar, and directory services with their own domain name for seamless and elevated communication and collaboration.

This new offering actually consolidates three existing Apple products, Apple Business Manager, Apple Business Essentials, and Apple Business Connect, and offers mobile device management for free, which will save some existing customers money. There are also some new API functions for larger organizations, and Apple is offering businesses access to Apple-hosted email and calendaring for the first time. The new Blueprints feature will make it easier for administrators to assign configurations and apps.

Also announced today is something that has been widely expected: ads in Maps in the U.S. and Canada. We now know those will arrive this summer. Apple provides additional details further on:

Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.

Again, it’s not a huge surprise to see this—Apple has been working on bolstering its ad business in the past few months. But it does mean that once this feature is enabled, you’ll have to scroll past an ad to see results when you search for stuff in Apple Maps.

Ads or no, companies that use Apple Business will also be able to edit their metadata and upload pictures directly into Apple Maps.

It’ll take some time to digest these changes, but it seems like this is a simplification of Apple’s business offering, and making MDM free will be a win for smaller organizations. Unfortunately, Apple’s still only offering 5GB of free iCloud data on managed accounts, and it’s hard to think that any business should rely on Apple’s notoriously unreliable email platform.

Go to the linked site.

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