Archived version: https://archive.ph/hguLn
Excerpt (and context):
Apple Maps’ offering might surprise people who remember its disastrous launch in 2012, which the Guardian described as the company’s “first significant failure in years”. Users were more than furious – they were lost, sometimes dangerously so. In Australia, police had to rescue tourists from the huge Murray-Sunset national park, after Maps placed the city of Mildura in the wrong place by more than 40 miles. Some of the motorists located by police had been stranded for 24 hours without food or water. In Ireland, ministers had to complain directly to Apple after a cafe and gardens called “Airfield” was designated by the service as an actual airport.
But mostly the map was just glitchy and unhelpful, its directions always a little off kilter. Users revolted and Apple made a rare retreat, allowing Google Maps to be used as the default on many iPhone apps and apologizing for the product.
I’m in the middle of a fairly populated US suburb, and Apple maps still sends anyone trying to find my house 3 blocks away, so I’m going to say that it’s not “finally good.”
As soon as I get those people to use Google Maps, they’re on their way without issues. I can see why Apple Maps might make the mistake that they do, but the fact is that Google Maps doesn’t and hasn’t ever in the last 15 years. I recently had a bunch of contractors around for quotes on some renovations and the iOS users ended up lost every time while the Android users never had a problem.
Betteridge’s law (of headlines) is an adage that states “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
Exception that proves the rule? Cause yeah, Apple Maps is actually a Google Maps competitor now, which is great.
If you live in some developed part of the world, sure. But it’s garbage in my country. Still shows my house location to be in a middle of a national park which is like 100 km away.
Don’t give it more credit than it deserves, it sucks in most developed countries too
It really isn’t so long as they’re using Yelp for reviews.
For just driving directions, sure. Google Maps is far more feature rich and I frequently end up regressing to Google whenever I need more info.
Really? Google reviews is manipulated horribly. The underlying project, the maps, Apple isn’t far behind and in some cases I’ve noticed it’s actually much better.
It’s still more functional than Apple Maps for reviews/discovery. I don’t want to use Google, believe me. Apple Maps is only good for directions/traffic awareness. It’s still lacking when it comes to discovering things / traveling compared to Google maps. I am trying to get off all Google services ASAP but this is one area they’re clearly ahead.
Yeah I use apple whenever I want the map on my Lock Screen but if I actually need to find something out comes google
How is Open Street Maps btw?
OSMAnd is great. Been using the free version for a long time. Only reason I keep Waze on my phone is to get live traffic, if I know I’ll run in to rush hour / traffic.
Wish an OSM app would get great live traffic.
I use Apple Maps for directions and Google maps when I want to “explore” or look for restaurants. Discovery on Apple Maps is still awful and requires you to have Yelp installed. On the flipside though they beat Google to having intersection lights and stop signs on the map while driving. The overall experience and animations are also far smoother on Apple Maps which is what makes me use it for driving. Google maps, like many Google products has a low framerate for its animations.
In the Netherlands, I want to say that Apple Maps is actually better than Google… but only if you’re driving.
For some insane reason they don’t have biking maps here (or at least in all the places I’ve tried) which is such an enormous blunder.
Wellll, considering I’ve recently needed to use Lyft and uber a good bit, and the drivers were mostly using apple stuff, and I had to open up my android device to use Waze so they could get guided for half the damn trip while apple’s maps just sat there spinning, I’m not very impressed.
My wife prefers iOS, so we’ve tried using it a handful of times when my device had other issues (broken screen, etc) and the damn thing got us lost three of those times. It did eventually get us back into areas I knew well enough to just get places myself, but it was a laggy, shitty experience.
I fucking hate Google for so many reasons, but their maps work. Waze works fine as well (though who knows for how long lol). Osmand is okay, but isn’t as reliable. Nothing else on android is any better than osmand, just different.
Apple maps just isn’t on par with any of those three yet. Maybe it will be eventually though!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But with one earbud in and Siri activated, you can have a friendly voice guide you through a foreign city, drifting you towards cycle lanes and safer routes and navigating often complex one-way systems.
In my hometown of London, where a lot of cycling routes are pathways in woods or through reservoirs, it has a habit of sending you down these dark and sometimes dangerous paths at night when the streets are much quicker and mostly empty.
In the post-apocalyptic, post-internet world in HBO’s The Last Of Us, there’s a scene in which the main character Joel, having spent weeks traversing an icy wasteland, happens upon a small cottage inhabited by an old couple.
As Cue himself recognises, “there are really only two mapmakers left in the world, in ourselves and Google” – and that monopoly of information, says Clancy Wilmott, a professor specialising in digital cartographies at Berkley, has consequences.
For their part, the Apple Maps engineers I spoke with acknowledged that they were more reliant on AI, aerial photography and existing data in rural settings and were focusing on expanding to more cities.
I’d say: ‘Once you’re on Ascension and you see the brick column, that driveway right after is mine.’ We’ve been working hard on that as well,” Cue says, adding that the future might be Siri telling you to “make a left at the yellow house”.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
