We’re all waiting with bated breath for Google to release Google Maps for iOS (or waiting for Apple to approve it, depending on who you listen to). But someone has gone ahead and done something about it. Hacker Ryan Petrich is working on getting Google Maps back into iOS 6 as soon as possible.
old Google-powered Maps mostly works on iOS 6.0 with a little trickery: youtube.com/watch?v=A2yZRG…
— Ryan Petrich (@rpetrich) September 23, 2012
If Petrich gets this working properly, it sounds like he plans on releasing it for jailbroken iOS 6 devices. There’s still a bit of work to do, as Petrich explained to TNW:
Currently it requires binaries from both an older 5.1 SDK and an older 5.1 version of iOS and is thus not redistributable. This issue was solved in the earlier “Spire” project I worked on with Grant Paul by building an installer that had the device fetch the appropriate files directly from Apple’s CDN, but it’s not clear that a similar approach would work here. There is no timeline on when it might be ready as I’m not certain this can be overcome.
Also, I’ve only gone through the effort to support the official Maps app and not the in-app MapKit views that are used in Foursquare and other apps. If the redistribution problem can be solved, I intend to add an option to bridge embedded map views over as well.
I still maintain hope that the official Google Maps will be out in the near future, but that’s me being optimistic. Those of you who have jailbroken might have more luck waiting for this sort of hack, rather than holding your breath for Google/Apple to play nice enough to get an official release.
Written By 