Apple Podcasts has launched the Hidden Histories guides in Apple Maps, giving listeners a new way to find podcast episodes tied to landmarks and lesser-known locations in five major U.S. cities.
A new Apple Maps guides collection covers San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Each guide connects places in Apple Maps with podcast episodes about the history, architecture, and people behind them.
Listeners can browse the full Hidden Histories collection or find individual city guides by searching for "Apple Podcasts" in Maps. It is yet another example of Apple using platform synergy to connect users of one service to another.
Hidden Histories uses the existing Guides system in Apple Maps, which collects recommended places from publishers and organizes them by city or interest. Apple says Guides can be saved and shared, and they update automatically when new places are added.
The existing Maps Guides feature lets people organize locations and explore curated recommendations. Apple also explains how to browse collections by city, interest, or publisher in its Guide documentation.
Hidden Histories takes that format and uses it for podcast discovery. Instead of serving as a standard list of restaurants, shops, or attractions, each guide points listeners toward episodes connected with places they can find in Maps.
The San Francisco guide includes stories about the 1863 "Egg War" on the Farallon Islands, the ruins of Sutro Baths, and the Wave Organ along San Francisco Bay.
Los Angeles selections cover the Hollywood Sign's beginnings as an advertisement for the Hollywoodland real estate development, along with stories about the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Rodeo Drive.
New York City's guide includes episodes about Tin Pan Alley, the Charging Bull near Wall Street, and vaults built into the Brooklyn Bridge before it opened.
Other selections cover the engineered reversal of the Chicago River and 19th-century bathtubs at the U.S. Capitol. The Washington guide also includes an episode about the Library of Congress comic book holdings, which the Library describes as the world's largest publicly available collection, with more than 165,000 original print issues.
Apple hasn't announced a new Maps feature or podcast format alongside Hidden Histories. The collection instead uses the company's existing Maps Guides system to give Apple Podcasts another way to surface episodes around the places they're about.
