Waze is superior in so many ways. It knows (most) contruction sites/road closures (there are many where I live), Waze tells me about speed traps and accidents. Maybe not the best UI, but I definitely get the best results. And I enjoy submitting Road closures etc myself - hoping that I am helping others get where they want faster/without unexpected issues. It's not perfect, but it has definitely saved me a lot of time.
But it's subject to flights of fancy similar to MapQuest circa 2002 where you find yourself taking some strange back road to save little or no travel time.
With no traffic, it's spot on. I feel like it doesn't account for traffic that develops during the commute. Given the length of my travel, the roads may be clear when I start, but very congested before I finish.
At least on Android, clicking a location link will allow you to open it in any installed application that's registered to handle it.
Sadly, that's true. I'm a big maps' aficionado and as such I prefer the Hybrid View (satellite + roads) whenever I'm looking for an address or POI on GMaps. I've noticed that the majority of people I interact with (work colleagues, closed ones) only use GMaps on maps view, and as such they don't know how to make sense of where exactly their desired POI is, because when they zoom in on it they usually see only some colored background with some lines (i.e. roads) on the side. While when using the Hybrid view you can actually see the buildings themselves and other physical reference points (a forest, a football field, a parking lot etc), which makes it way more easier for you when you actually want to get to said POI.
As such, I fully believe that for these types of people switching Apple Maps in place of GMaps would make no difference at all, it's just switching a blob of colored backgrounds and lines with another blob of colored backgrounds and lines, while GMaps' preeminence, IMHO, is in its exceptional and unique satellite views quality.
Also, Google Maps has become much less good for driving, since you frequently have to zoom in quite far to see a street name. I don't know if Apple Maps is better, but I know that Google Maps used to show a lot more street names. It would be nice to have a choice about whether I see businesses and landmarks or street names, rather than making it for me.
Google still wins on the lane awareness but that's their only advantage.
It absolutely staggers me that nobody seems to bother making sure street names are actually visible on the map. I don't know how anyone that ships navigation software without visible street names sleeps at night.
That's the worst thing with Google Maps for me. It drives me mad when I'm trying to navigate on foot. I never trust the compass in my phone, so figuring out my direction by looking at street names is actually pretty important. (I prefer doing that anyway, because that's just how people use maps). It's to the point where if a street actually doesn't have a name, I'll still spend a minute trying to trick Google Maps into showing one because there's no way to tell.
Does Apple do a better job with it?
>>Google still wins on the lane awareness but that's their only advantage.
In the past I've preferred listening to Google Maps while driving, rather than listening to Apple Maps.
I just bought a car that supports Apple Carplay. My first impression is it's pretty damn good. A nice chunk of the display is dedicated to the distance to the next turn, the name of the street to turn onto, an arrow showing the direction of the turn, etc.
Presumably "Android Carplay" or whatever Google calls it is also good. The point is that a smartphone integrated with a display screen on the dash produces a much nicer driving experience than a smartphone by iteslf.
Edit: BTW this only works well if you've entered a destination. The Carplay display of Apple Maps is total crap in terms of street names etc if just randomly driving around. Maybe that's your complaint with Google? You mean while driving around rather than navigating to a specific destination?
Perhaps I just haven't figured out how to make Apple Maps display better without entering a destination.
I didn't know google maps did this or I would have used it. I was using Waze instead, as it's my default.
I made a conscious effort to use Apple Maps, Google Maps and Waze and found Apple & Google to be equivalent for routing. Sometimes the routes varied, but they were pretty solid. Waze was either super-useful time saver or a complete waste of time.
I was flabbergasted when it suggested a bed and breakfast in Cape Town, South Africa, instead of the one 3 miles away by the same name. (I'm in the US)
> Several months after Apple Maps became the default, something like 2/3rds of all users switched away from Google Maps.
When Apple Maps 'became the default', what actually happened was it outright replaced the Google-powered Maps app entirely, and there was no replacement Google-written Maps app _for_ several months. People didn't 'switch away', they were switched, you could not stay on google maps if you wanted to.
Per your numbers, 1/3rd of a platform switching back (despite having to wait months and install a new app to do so) sounds like a pretty big return to me. But I don't think there's a lot we can infer about users' propensity to set search engine defaults vs propensity to install/use apps.
Even today (the actually happened this morning), I type an address two blocks away and I'm shown an address in Portugal. I live in Argentina. Why it assumed I was looking for a street across the Atlantic Ocean rather than one within walking distance is beyond me (also, the street name did not match).
This also happens if I tap on a contact's address -- even though the contacts app shows the minimap with the right location.
If you want the convenience of Apple Watch, Siri, or CarPlay, you are stuck using Apple Maps. It's a shame, because I love my Apple Watch for two main reasons: being able to control music and navigation in the car. My 2015 GTI was one year prior to VW's introduction of CarPlay, and this damn watch gets me about 80% of the way there without a $2k retrofit.
If I know where I'm going before I get in my car, it's Google Maps for me. More POIs, fewer outdated addresses or incorrect business hours, and better traffic negotiation.
I used it briefly at the time and it was worse than the media hype suggested, in the worst case routing me back and forth across most of the North-South axis of California for a cross-town trip.
> While it was worse than Google Maps it was still as good or better than most automaker nav and portable units people were accustomed to using.
Even with a map database that is now a decade out of date, my Prius's onboard nav has never given me the kind of problems Apple Maps did in my brief period of using it, and its had far more opportunity.
I use Apple services for quite a few things, so whenever I hear about a data breach I evaluate how I use the service and how I can guard against similar breaches that might affect my data.
EDIT: I should point out that this applies to other services that I use as well. This is something everyone who relies on a 3rd party service should keep an eye on as a matter of course.
Even if Apple had data breaches that it was responsible for (you do know that the celebrity titty-shot photos were all social-engineered/re-used passwords right? None were actually iCloud breaches), that isn't about privacy, that's about security.
Google literally builds profiles about it's products (the eyeballs looking at *.google.com) to better place ads in front of said eyeballs, because that's how they make 90% of their money.
Apple does everything it can to anonymise what data it does need to see: there's no sign-in for maps, it reset's it's random identifier periodically, and each route is split into multiple segments.