Hello AD Forums,
I am a member of the ADP and am working on an iOS app for the App Store.
My app needs to match the user’s current location to one of Germany’s 400 district-level administrative areas: Landkreise and kreisfreie Städte.
In Firebase, each region has a geoTagName field. The app compares the detected location name against this geoTagName to load the correct internal region document.
I need to understand the recommended Apple/Core Location field for this use case.
My current understanding is:
-
CLPlacemark.administrativeArea usually represents the federal state in Germany, for example “Thüringen” or “Bayern”.
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CLPlacemark.locality usually represents the city, municipality, or town.
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CLPlacemark.subAdministrativeArea seems to be the most likely candidate for the German Landkreis / kreisfreie Stadt level.
However, I need to know whether CLPlacemark.subAdministrativeArea is the correct and reliable field for identifying German Landkreise and kreisfreie Städte.
I also tested Apple Maps Server API /v1/reverseGeocode. For district-level locations in Germany, it often returns values such as:
administrativeArea: Thüringen
locality: Bad Sulza
but no value such as:
subAdministrativeArea: Weimarer Land
Example coordinate tested:
50.9957525, 11.5129989
My questions are:
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Is CLPlacemark.subAdministrativeArea the recommended field to identify German Landkreise and kreisfreie Städte in an iOS app?
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Are there known differences between iOS CLGeocoder.reverseGeocodeLocation and Apple Maps Server API /v1/reverseGeocode regarding subAdministrativeArea?
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Does Apple provide any official list, dataset, or recommended validation method for the exact district-level names used by Core Location / Apple Maps in Germany?
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How should an app distinguish cases where a kreisfreie Stadt and a Landkreis have the same name, for example:
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Stadt Augsburg
-
Landkreis Augsburg
-
Stadt Ansbach
-
Landkreis Ansbach
-
Stadt Aschaffenburg
-
Landkreis Aschaffenburg
- Should administrativeArea be avoided for this use case because it represents the federal state level in Germany?
The goal is to create reliable matching between the Apple/Core Location result and our Firebase geoTagName values.
Thank you.