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Comment by blauditore | Hacker News Reader

The article reads like there are no noteworthy alternatives to those two. But in my experience, at least HERE Maps and Bing Maps are quite up to par. Especially HERE is quite strong when it comes to navigation.

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My only real complaint about HERE is that it's search is inferior. Google maps always lets me just type in the name of the store or restaurant, while with HERE I find that far too often I have to use Google to find the actual address and then type that in.

In my Windows Phone I really LOVED HERE Maps, but I'm quite disappointed about Maps on Windows 10 (I own a Lumia 830 and I updated from Windows Phone 8.1 to Windows 10 Mobile).

I know that Maps use data from HERE, but the search algorithm it's not as good as on HERE, and until a few months ago the Maps user interface was rubbish. Now it's a better but still there is no alternative to Nokia Drive on Windows 10 Mobile: you simply can't (or at least I didn't find a way) to activate the drive interface without looking for a destination.

Windows Maps is less clever than HERE, for example if I look for a street named "Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, 4" (I'm Italian) often it doesn't show the nearest one to me, but it drives me some other road, often in another city. And I always need to remember to input the exact name of the street, if I just digit "Via Garibaldi, 4" (very common form of abbreviation in Italy) it doesn't show any results or it gets me a completely useless one. HERE worked all the times. It is also not uncommon that number positioning on streets is not accurate; sadly, there were times I had to open Google Maps on Edge to look for the correct position on #34 on the street I was on, because Windows Maps was showing incorrect data and I couldn't find it by myself (that is the reason I was using a GPS navigator in the first place).

> Especially HERE is quite strong when it comes to navigation.

IIRC, HERE maps is built by actual navigation rather than crowd sourcing which makes it more accurate than other ones.

Google did use their Street View cars to check navigation. They also use government data and crowd sourcing. I imagine that, on average, they have the best maps in areas where they are active. HERE may have better coverage overall.

In areas with active communities, that OpenStreetMap is crowd sourced is probably more of a strength than a weakness. The issue for OSM is that there are lots of places where there aren't any active contributors, never mind a community.

This tools makes it easy to compare several web maps:

http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/

They lead with this, which is probably why others aren't considered...

>> both are in a race to become the world’s first Universal Map — that is, the first map used by a majority of the global population

Is Apple actually trying to have a universal map? Can you even use Apple maps if you're not on an Apple device?

Exactly. There are a number of maps racing for world domination, Apple isn't one of them.

Except that HERE has more of the world mapped than google...

>> But in my experience, at least HERE Maps and Bing Maps are quite up to par

when I had my Windows phones, I preferred the Bing Map app to Google Maps. I always thought the UI was superior and more user friendly to Google Maps.

I had a similar experience on WP and preferred HERE Maps.

One reason for the poor quality of Google Maps was the lack of an official App, and third-party ones were quite poor. Google seems to have a policy against releasing apps for Mobile Windows platforms that goes further than just "we don't care".

Since Windows phone has such a low % of users and then expense in supporting some thing as complicated as Google maps it would make sense to focus on the two. With Android and iOS they can hit 90%+ of users.

As an engineer, I don't want to build something for a 0.3% (and declining) platform while my colleague is building the same app for a 80% platform in the same team. It's like you are writing codes which will be soon deprecated.

EDIT: market share http://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os;jsession...

Yep, and now you'll probably find them in cars as branded built-in nav.

Wow, that would be nice. I remember having a MUCH better experience as well when my Windows phone paired with the Microsoft Connect in my Toyota Corolla.

The difference between the Windows phone and Android was pretty huge:

Android text message:

- Message pops up that I have a text message, I have two buttons, ignore or read.

Windows Phone text message:

Voice alert asks if I want to read it or ignore it. After reading it I can:

- delete it

- respond via voice command

- or call person back from number

It's a pretty big difference, and one I really noticed when I went back to my Android phone.

Yeah, sadly that doesn't mean it has the fully same UI. But at least in my Mazda (which uses HERE as the nav driver), the UI is noticably better designed for driving than the phone interfaces are. Minor details mostly, but noticable.

There are alternatives. But what is the marketshare of the alternatives? And how do they compare?

Does HERE have anywhere near the marketshare of Google Maps (>1 bil.) or Apple Maps (~800 mil.)?

Even though they have their own app, HERE is primarily a data provider for others (car manufacturers, I think Bing maps)

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