I agree that Apple Maps is currently better, but I attribute that mostly to the quality of Google Maps severely degrading in recent years.

It has gotten so bad, that I've dusted off my old stand-alone GPS and keep it in my car's center console. Google Maps no longer has reliability that I can count on for a road trip.

> Apple Maps' reputation is much worse than it deserves

I haven't used it since launch, so can't comment on its current performance, but AFAICT its reputation is due to how poor it was at launch. I tried it with three locations that Google Maps handled fine (small sample I know, but enough to put me off trying it further), and had problems with all three results (my house: low-res satellite imagery; my College: wrong website address; Cambridge Union Society: correct details, but location was about 50mi out).

Hopefully its now better, but that initial impression is hard to shake.

Edit: initially -> initial

Someone clearly lives in the US... Probably in the Bay Area.

edit: just tested Apple Maps with a couple searches I did in Google Maps yesterday. Searched for the carrier shops for the two biggest carriers in my country. First search took me to Australia. The other ones found nothing in my city (there are probably at least 10-20 of each carrier in this town) and zoomed out to country level. Still completely and utterly useless.

That said, I'm no big Google Maps fan either, they have a lot of data issues as well. I tend to use a local app which works much better for public transit and car navigation, and has a nice category drill-down for POIs which works around a lot of the issues with free-text search

Apple Maps, in many ways, is more usable than Google Maps when it comes to directions / heads up on turns and such. Unfortunately, it's still missing a glaring feature for me where I can't get it to ignore toll roads or highways when calculating directions. Even if I manually jigger it to avoid the road I want to avoid, it still "corrects" and tries to send me on that road.

They need to get some more of the driving GPS features figured out and I'll switch over entirely.

In my city, Google Maps has NO transit, NO satellite images since 2004, NO map data since 2010. Here maps has satellite and transit, and Apple Maps even has full 3D buildings.

Following is a set of complaints I compiled last year when a Google employee asked me on reddit to post them more detail about my maps complaints.

The usability of any Google product outside the US is a total disaster, and it’s a wonder how Google is able to keep any market share with their quality of service.

NONE of this has been addressed since we started complaining in 2005 (!), except for one thing: that connection between two streets, which is closed with a fence, has been marked as closed. So now we have less people standing there trying to get through.

> https://www.google.com/maps/@54.3559928,10.0734304,18z

> http://imgur.com/a/DyRBT

> The map data on top is from the municipality, the map data on bottom from Google.

> As you see, the street "Beim Bauernhaus" is completely missing, the "Kellerkate" is missing half the street, the connection between "Beim Bauernhaus" and "Kellerkate" is missing, the "Kl. Koppel" is missing parts of the street.

> You currently have data from 2010 for this specific area.

> The data you currently have access to from GeoBasis-DE is this: http://i.imgur.com/67TQeP8.png

> At least the connection between Steinberg and Nienbrügger Weg is now marked as service path, until recently it was marked as street and people tried to get through there (there’s a fence making that impossible).

> I won’t get too much into satellite data either, because yours is from 2004, too:

> https://www.google.com/maps/@54.3530178,10.0703569,529m/data...

> https://www.here.com/?map=54.35308,10.07028,17,satellite

> And the unavailability of Public Transit data for busses, etc. on Google Maps – which is available on Here.com – makes it unlikely that I, as a student using public transit all the time – am going to switch back.