Late last week, we covered a new feature that had been discovered in Apple Maps on iOS 8 — flyover city tours. It was previously thought that the feature could only be accessed through a series of debug menus, but 9to5Mac reader Stefan Kujit found that the flyover tours are actually accessible to anyone with iOS 8… just as long as you’re prepared to do a little bit of digging.
In order to take a virtual flyover tour, you need to be in Hybrid view and find a city in Apple Maps with a yellow label. Tap on the name of the city and you’ll see the button for the tour appear. The cities that currently feature a flyover tour include New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Paris, Rome and Barcelona. The same feature reportedly also appears in the Maps app on Yosemite as well, so you can embark on the same tour on your desktop as well.
Considering the specific steps you have to take in order to even find the tours, it’s fair to assume that Apple is still working to fully implement the feature before heavily publicizing it.
As you can see in the video from 9to5Mac, the full Paris tour is rather extensive, jumping from landmark to landmark while exploring the city in detail. If you’ve already upgraded to iOS 8, be sure to check out other flyover tours for yourself and see if the rest are as comprehensive.
