Remember that time when you went to the mall, watched a nice movie, dined out at a great restaurant and had the entire evening ruined because you couldn’t locate your car when you came back to the parking lot. Was it basement 1 or basement 2? Did you park it towards the front or the back? What was the pillar number? Are you even in the right mall?
Does this sound familiar? It’s a universal problem and Apple has decided to come out with a solution for it. This new iOS 10 feature promises to solve the problem with its ‘Parked Car’ feature.
Your iPhone will proactively remember where you parked your car.
One of the updates to the Maps App is going to be this feature that tracks you when you’re in your car. When you stop and get out of the car, your iPhone will remember that last location. It will then help you locate your car when you get back.
We’re not sure if this new iOS 10 feature will work on its own or if you’ll have to specifically ask (maybe through Siri) for your parking location. Either way, it’s going to be a pretty handy feature.
Which makes you wonder, why is this an iOS 10 feature? Why was this not brought out in earlier iterations? The question gains even more weight when you realise that this feature has been in Android for over two years now.
Yup, you read that right. Not two weeks, or two months. Two whole years!! Google Now has been able to find and locate your parked car location proactively. Meaning that you don’t have to ask Google for your location. It’ll just be there. Ready for you.
As an iOS 10 feature, is this too little, too late?
Apple always does this — waiting out a feature until it has “perfected” it. However, it’s not uncommon for them to arrive late to the party. It’s happened before. Remember how we didn’t have the ability to forward messages? Or how there was no notification centre until iOS 7? And now the parking feature is coming two years late!
These are all pretty useful features and Apple needs to do a better job of catching up on them quickly. This is where they should take a leaf out of Google’s book. The search giant has no problem introducing new features (borrowed from others) into Android if it feels they can add productivity.
Let’s hope that in the future, Apple is not so uptight about “perfecting” the app so thoroughly that by the time it launches, it loses the context. Apple always thinks that it knows better than us what we want. Sorry to break your bubble, Apple, but sometimes, our tiny little ape brains are capable of producing an independent thought! And we would thank you to remember that.
