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Comment by encoderer | Hacker News Reader

I recently switched to Apple maps primary for car play after 10+ years. I haven’t looked back.

Building outlines are not much of a moat for me.

Do you ever manage to get where you're actually trying to go though? ;)

In all seriousness, I've found Apple Maps search to be absolutely horrendous, either missing places or having them in the wrong spot.

Let me give the experiment more time, it’s only been a few thousand miles, but so far I’ve found it in SF Bay Area to be equally as good. And I prefer it’s design to google maps or waze.

Did you try recently or in the 2011 debut debacle era? Honestly for the longest time it was in my junk folder due to bad early experiences.

I'll admit it has been a while but it was more recently than 2011.

In the Midwest, Google isn't that great either. On a site I run I often have automatically-generated links to Google Maps where my software puts the business name and then the street address into a Google Maps search and half the time it fails. But if I just put the address without the business name, it brings me to the right spot.

Driving to my grandparents house until two or three years ago, Google would route you off a paved highway down an impassable two-track road only to bring you back around to the highway later.

When you're up against that kind of technology, Apple Maps doesn't seem so painful.

I switched as well, for different reasons. Some things I found that I liked about apple maps: its navigation has speed limit information and I much prefer its design. It seems less busy, and it gets out of my way. Something about google maps just felt really cramped. I know that sounds really subjective, but I enjoyed using one more than the other.

That said, google has better directions and estimates. And maybe that should trump all. It hasn’t been enough of an issue to convince me to reinstall.

It's a bit of a hack but I run Waze in the background when I'm doing navigation via Google Maps. It'll play a sound at me when I exceed the speed limit and it'll warn me about upcoming road hazards (and cops!).

Speed trap warnings are the one killer feature keeping me locked into Waze.

Google Maps has a show speed limit toggle, behind a setting.

I think that only works in the Bay area and Brazil for now.

I was thinking the same thing of "who cares."

I take the train and walk a lot more than I drive. I need street names, and GMaps have made them harder and harder to see for years:

https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps/

I gotta pinch zoom all the way in, jiggle the map around a bunch, just to see street names. It's annoying as fuck since it's the most important thing on the map when walking in a city to orientate yourself (because we all know those digital compasses are garbage).

I should really just carry a magnetic compass on my key chain again.

I really miss the classic maps interface. More streets, more relevant detail and much much faster. Classic maps that used the whole screen without the white area on the left, and the vector rendering tech would have been way better than their crappy web interface now.

Or buy a proper hiking GPS. Garmin makes great products. They also run off two AA batteries for like a week.

> I was thinking the same thing of "who cares."

> I take the train and walk a lot more than I drive.

Intersting, I have the opposite opinion precisely because I walk to most places. Building outlines give you a good idea of where you can walk–often taking the Manhattan path through a city is suboptimal, and you can cut through blocks based on what's in them. Building outlines let you know if there are alleyways that you can go through.

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