2 years later, Apple has closed its useful COVID-19 service

No more Mobiity Reports

Apple quietly and without mention ceased publishing its Mobility Trends Reports on April 14, no one seemed to notice, but I think it’s a shame.

What were Mobility Trends Reports?

Apple introduced the reports two years ago as the pandemic really began to bite. The report provide aggregated navigation data from Apple Maps and aimed to show how mobiole people were being.

At the time, the company said the data was being made available as it may provide helpful insights to local governments and health authorities and could be used as a foundation for new public policies by showing the change in volume of people driving, walking, or taking public transit in their communities.

During the pandemic, it became an excellent way to track national trends, one of the biggest being a move away from public transport and a relative increase in driving. Albeit mitigated by people not wanting to see people to prevent infection.

Apple has now stopped publishing them

Two years later and Apple is joining the make-believe show that the COVID emergency is over, which is of course not the case.

In the UK deaths this month have reached the same peak they achieved in January with thousands in hospital even as the number of tests taking place has fallen considerably. Don’t talk about China, either. But why let the statistics spoil a perfectly broken economy?

I confess to being quite disappointed that Apple has shuttered these mobility reports, particularly as it has done so at the same time as beginning to insist its employees return to the office.

Information is power, so they took it away

I had hoped the reports would remain a useful barometer of how people’s habits have changed in the long term, and would continue to provide valuable insights to city planners and others. Not only that, but they represented a valuable source of data to help estimate the extent to which working habits have changed as hybrid working practice quite rightfully becomes normalized.

I believe employees have been through so much they completely deserve flexibility and autonomy.

At time of writing, Google continues to provide similar mobility data, and this quite clearly shows some of the changes that have taken place, but the reactionary move to both raise taxes to force populations to pay for the last two years at the same time as the removal of every trace of hard won privilege in terms of remote working seems unimpressive.

We need to put down bricks in roads toward better worlds, not build walls higher.

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