As pointed out by German website iPhoneBlog.de, Apple’s new ‘Find My iPhone’ app on its iCloud.com beta website now uses Apple Maps, instead of Google Maps. While the public version of iCloud.com is still using Google Maps data, beta.icloud.com is however using an online version of Apple Maps for its location information.

It seems that even though Apple’s vector-based maps are lightweight and load faster, the functionality remains pretty much the same between the two versions of maps. Performance tests by AppleInsider show that the Google Maps-powered version transferred some 4 megabytes of data for a single request, compared to just over 400 kilobytes for Apple Maps.

When Apple dropped support for Google Maps and replaced it with its own mapping solution with the introduction of iOS 6, iCloud.com still remained tied to Google, though iOS apps such as Find My iPhone and Find My Friends also were converted to Apple’s mapping data a few months later. But now, it looks like iCloud.com will soon be getting data exclusively from Apple’s Maps as well.

Could this be the beginning of Apple’s transition to move its heavily criticised Maps application online?