I can barely contain my excitement and this is a bit much for a tweet. I have been ranting for months about how Apple Maps Search API is broken and how much I would prefer to use their native solution instead of importing a 3rd party one from Google that comes in at a little over 100 MB of bloat. I had noticed that map search significantly improved in iOS 9.0 in the Maps app, but the MKLocalSearch API for 3rd party apps was still horrible. For example, as I started typing a location, the first suggestion was often in Brazil. I love Brazil, but I live in Southern California, so a Brazilian location coming up as the first choice doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Turns out, in iOS 9.3 Apple introduced MKLocalSearchCompleter which seems to fix the broken search. In the limited testing I’ve done for the past 30 min, this API is a million times better than what we had prior to 9.3. I made a small sample project that gives an example of how to use the API. Also want to shout-out George McDonnell whose post I found on StackOverflow talking about using this API.
