Maps and location data are at the center of so many amazing app experiences, whether it’s finding your next date on Tinder thanks to a shared love of dog parks, navigating to your destination on Uber, or simply identifying the best place to eat nearby on Foursquare City Guide. For connected consumers, context is king, and smart developers leverage location to deliver meaningful and innovative experiences for users.
As a location technology company with our own consumer apps and developer tools that have powered the tech community for nearly a decade, we know this all too well. Today, we’re thrilled to announce a new partnership that allows even more developers to easily build world-class location and mapping functionality into any mobile or web app.
Foursquare is now the primary location provider powering all point of interest (POI) data in Mapbox’s location platform, including Mapbox’s API and full product suite. Mapbox is a location data platform that provides developers like Snapchat, Instacart, and Lonely Planet with the building blocks to add location features like maps, search, and turn by turn navigation into their mobile and web apps. By teaming up, we’re bringing together two of the industry’s leading location APIs and allowing a global ecosystem of nearly 1 million developers to benefit from the flexibility of Mapbox and the world-class quality of Foursquare’s location database.
With Foursquare’s Places Database and API, Mapbox will now be able to offer developers access to the largest global first party-driven location data, encompassing more than 105 million venues worldwide.
“This is an amazing refresh of our map. Places are everything and the 105 million new venues cover them all; from restaurants and bars to hotels and coffee shops, all over the world,” said Eric Gundersen, Mapbox CEO. “After using Foursquare for years, it’s nice to have the places I go in the maps we make.”
Smooth Integration Saves Developers Time and Effort
In the past, developers using both Mapbox and Foursquare POI data would need to integrate and manage two separate systems. Now, Foursquare POIs are seamlessly integrated across Mapbox’s entire product suite, providing consistency to developers across search, display, routing, and navigation.
Foursquare’s consumer roots and first-party data are a distinct advantage in terms of coverage, accuracy and freshness over third-party sources — as businesses open, close, and relocate, the Foursquare dataset reflects these updates.
In addition to POI data, developers can also easily incorporate even more powerful Foursquare features, such as displaying rich data on venues like photos, reviews, ratings, and pricing estimates. And if developers want greater capabilities, access to more kinds of data or more flexibility with the current 30-day data storage limit, they can also work directly with Foursquare to find the unique and customized solution they need.
Inventing the Future with AR
Together with Mapbox, we’re making it easier for developers to build and innovate in the location space. Today, Mapbox unveiled the React-Native AR SDK, which makes it easier for a broader set of developers to build location-based AR experiences using our API. Imagine holding up your phone and being able to see relevant points-of-interest and their proximity to you as you move through the world, or playing games that adapt to your surroundings based on where you play them. These types of experiences will now be possible, and easier than ever to make a reality.
Let’s go build the next generation of location experiences for cars, AR, VR and much more together.
For more information about how leading technology companies are using Foursquare’s POI data, or to check out our Places API for yourself, visit developer.foursquare.com.
