What can we expect from Foursquare’s new app?

According to a recent Foursquare post on Twitter, the company just had the next version of its iPhone application approved by Apple. (The post thanked “SantaJobs,” apparently a reference to Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs.)

Foursquare cofounders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai have been dropping a lot of hints about a major revamp to Foursquare, a popular location service used by 5 million people who announce their location to friends by checking in on an app or a mobile-optimized website. Foursquare has been collecting a lot of data on its users’ whereabouts — and it now may be ready to use that data to recommend new places for them to visit.

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The company also recently released a new API in beta which may help third-party developers harness the new recommendation tools, too.

Word of the “recommendation” feature first surfaced several months ago when Crowley mentioned the company was testing ways to recommend places and friends to users while speaking at Picnic, an annual three-day festival for sharing concepts in Amsterdam.  

Another feature may include photo sharing, according to a recently surfaced screenshot first discovered by Mashable. Giving users the ability to add photos to a check in and share with friends could be a popular feature that may help the company in its continued quest to grow. Some third-party apps like Instagram allow users to post a photo and tie it to a location by simultaneously checking into Foursquare.

Foursquare isn’t the only location-based service updating its app. Most recently, Loopt unveiled its 4.0 version to be more robust and competitive. Gowalla just releases its own new version that most notably lets users integrate with Facebook Places and Foursquare.

The New York City-based company, founded in 2009, has raised more than $21 million in funding and currently has more than 40 employees in its hometown and a new engineering office it’s opening in San Francisco.