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I’m noodling around Apple Maps in iOS and came across this section about exploring guides. Nothing there really interested me but I could imagine such a guide from a particular publisher of interest would.

How are publishers chosen to be featured in Apple Maps? I presume it’s like search engines only a blessed finite few are selected to play this role. Is that the case with featured guides as well?

Is there a way to share guides offline to a file or an iCloud link or something of the like?

ios screenshot Apple Maps explore guides

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So there is a share option for Guides. It appears to be a base URL (https://guides.apple.com/) with a query string that changes with each edit to the guide. So far it seems like adding and removing locations to the guide as well as renaming the guide all change some hashing function or something that correlates with each location.

Here’s some samples below.

one entry https://guides.apple.com/?ug=CgJBQhINCK5NELXwxfzV182BbZeAA3DA3D

added entry https://guides.apple.com/?ug=CoJBQhINCK5NE0582F1ZDH6ULVHhINCK5NELXwxfzV182BbZeAR3013D

https://guides.apple.com/?ug=CgJBOhIMCK5NENz0v5zGmY9nEg0Irk005L92FVkMfg4tUeEq0Irk00tfDF%2FNWL5t14

So someone could host such a link with an anchor that updates but it seems like clients would have to refresh their guides to keep up to date I would think since the query string is not constant.

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    I dug into this. Turns out the string after ug is partially base 64 encoded. I was able to partially receive the guide name from the first couple of characters but the rest were jumbled
    – rsn
    Commented Nov 30, 2022 at 17:16

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