A Year of Google and Apple Maps

This is the most significant fact:

> Over the course of a year, Google quietly turned its map inside-out – transforming it from a road map into a place map.

I've long been amazed how we somehow transitioned during the early 20th century from a mental model of roads and paths running through locations to places (house lots, etc) being the spaces between the roads. It's a natural thing to happen, but one of those invisible flips that happens on a timescale longer than a human lifetime.

But this anticipates the opposite: if you can stop worrying about how to get somewhere (because you don't have to drive or plan much -- self-driving or Lyft-style services can take care of the route planning) you can focus on the destination.

We see this phenomenon in subway maps which are famously schematic and not geographical.

(BTW the transformation is visible in literature, which is how I noticed it. The sense of geography in, say, Jane Austin is completely alien to today).

It's also interesting to see how maps evolve (or fail to evolve) for places that are not San Francisco.

At the moment, Apple Maps seems to have a more thought-through design for public transit than Google Maps. Which is to say, transit view in Apple Maps is either visually clean and uncluttered, or completely nonexistent, depending on whether they got around to adding your city. Clearly a lot of by-hand design work goes into it, which isn't a very scalable approach.

On the other hand, transit data in Google sometimes appears to have been munged with no human intervention and never received even a cursory check by a graphic designer. For example, turning on Transit view in downtown Toronto will show a mess of ungodly rainbow spaghetti which is meant to represent the streetcar system. There are lines on non-revenue tracks where no streetcars actually run, lines on streets that don't have streetcar tracks, random artefact lines that appear and then vanish two blocks later, and lines drawn diagonally through the middle of High Park where there is no street at all. Somehow, the data behind this spaghetti is diligently updated year-after-year (e.g. the new Cherry streetcar was added in 2016) without anyone involved in the process noticing that the results are hideously garbled.

It also took them about a decade to realize that the SkyTrain in Vancouver is a rapid transit system.

One thing I think Google has going for is it "Guides" program. Where user get "points" for correcting mistakes, adding new places, and publishing pictures. I have been in it for a few months and it feels good to contribute.

I was curious to see how well OpenStreetMap (OSM) had these locations mapped: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/37.77620/-122.42455

Additional data point about the missing "coastline dropshadows", on top of the general "bleaching" trend: that kind of effect is also not free to implement in WebGL or in mobile apps. Plus the folks that were involved in designing it have since left.

> This all seems to suggest that Google’s location data is more precise than Apple’s. (Or that Apple’s geocoder is buggy.) And perhaps here we’re seeing the fruits of Google’s decade-long Street View project.

How can Apple catch up? Is there an obvious acquisition?

My biggest problem with google maps is that it doesn't respect the font size settings of my device. A four point font is not ideal for my eyes in the best of conditions, much less when travelling and navigating.

Justin O'Beirne's articles are extremely detailed as always. It's definitely a must-see for mappers whatever the company or products you're working with.

I can't for the life of me understand why Apple pays TomTom for maps of places where OpenStreetMap is unequivocally more accurate. OpenStreetMap also has the correct layout of the footpaths at the north and south of the park, points of interest for every bench and a marked area in the location and correct shape of the playground, making the data (at least assuming Google renders their best data) considerably higher quality. I think this says a lot, especially considering the default leg-up that Google has here. They have images of the contours of every one of those paths, they have GPS traces, they have photogrammetry-quality photography and location, they have lots of people writing photogrammetry software; and yet for some reason they still don't appear to fuse the streetview, aerial, and satellite imagery, or seem to do feature detection for points of interest.

The big problem which seems to make it not worth expanding your dataset for graphical maps, is that it is quite difficult to display a lot of data, and still be easier to read than an aerial photograph.

I was surprised by how out of date Apple maps were. I guess TomTom doesn't update their data that much.

The thing I still don't get is, why don't any of these map services indicate traffic lights? When navigating to an unfamiliar place, counting the lights, or looking for the next traffic light, is much easier than using distance or street names.

The At a Distance blog has extensively covered Apple Maps' deficiencies (and progress) in Japan where Yahoo maps is the best option.

https://atadistance.net

It can't be coincidence that Google's increased focus on areas and places brings it closer to Apple Maps. It's easy to miss because of Apple's poorer data, but I think their app legitimately bested Google in some areas (heh), and this is Google absorbing those characteristics.

Id love to see them compare Here maps. I use Here for all my driving. Its much better interface, directions timing and has some unique features.Also I like the idea of supporting an independent player. While Google Maps is better when looking for businesses like a restaurant etc.

How can I configure OpenStreetMap to use the old Google Maps colours with an emphasis on roads?

I'm currently using some offline cached maps tiles downloaded with MOBAC, and waiting for Google to change their colours back again. Now I realise that it's a place map, and places generate advertising revenue, I think that Google is unlikely to fix that.

Another problem that happened recently in Taiwan was when Google removed pinyin (latin letters) from the street names, leaving only Chinese characters. Foreigners living here couldn't find their way around. I threw together a quick alternative to GMaps, and told people about it - until Google put the pinyin back about a week later.

It seems that with the increasing attention given to 'places' and less emphasis on the actual roads we are looking at Google getting Maps ready for the roll-out of self driving cars where the focus is on the destination rather than the journey.

It's a pitty he doesn't compare it to OpenStreetMap also.

I'm a little disappointed that the "Cartography Comparison" only looks at two commercial maps. Not even all commercial maps, let alone including OpenStreetMap. A big post detailing the minute differences between two of the big ones are not that interesting...

Well, here in Venezuela Apple Maps is practically useless. Traffic data just arrived about a year ago to Google Maps and it's been a fantastic tool to get on time to most places. Apple Maps doesn't even give directions.

My main complaint is the decrease is display priority of personal labels except for the stars.

Back in the day before labels I would star places I needed to "bookmark" regardless of importance in time and how ephemeral that mark was. Then when labels appeared I thought that was ideal to mark places which are always important (because I can personalize the label) as opposed to a generic star which most likely meant a temporary bookmark.

It seems that with this new Google maps, the stars always get display priority (it's shown even at smallest zoom level) whereas labels only appear at a algorithmically defined location (which seems arbitrary).

All this time wasted in personalizing my map.

Google maps has the lane to use and Apple maps does not and i have a terrible sense of direction so Google maps is really my only viable choice.

> And as of 2014, Google had already driven 99% of U.S. public roads

Nope. Try dragging Pegman over anywhere in the rural Midwest and see what you get. 99% of US _paved_ roads, perhaps.

Great in-depth analysis that goes beyond what's obvious on the surface.

This guy is a Real American Hero

In response to the very last lines of the article:

"Three different looks? What’s going on with Google Maps’ design?"

A/B testing perhaps?