People are safer with Apple Maps being down. Probably intentional.
I was pleasantly surprised. The UI is slick, there are no ads, it does traffic-based redirection, lane guidance (something Waze still doesn't do), lane closure warnings - it's pretty good.
I guess the usual criticism is that the maps are inaccurate but it's really improved over the past year or two. I think the knee-jerk complaints are from people who haven't used it recently.
I appreciate that it's the only major nav app that doesn't constantly record my position in the cloud.
For example, where I live in Germany Apple Maps for the most part doesn't even have transit, while Google Maps has had it since years.
Or just recently I was looking for a supermarket which was supposedly very close to my location, so I looked it up on Apple Maps where the next one was. Told me it as 14km away. Turns out it was actually one street from where I was around a corner. Google Maps had the correct location.
I prefer Apple Maps' UX, but their data is either outdated or just plain wrong at times, which makes it effectively useless for a lot of things I now use Google Maps for.
Recently, they build a few new roads which Apple Maps didn't know about (Google maps recognised it very early), so they keep sending people in the wrong direction. After about 3 months i got so annoyed that i sent feedback to Apple Maps to have it added which took me like half an hour to get through the process of adding/feedback.
The sad thing is, the reason why Apple Maps is worse, is probably because they respect peoples privacy. Unlike Google, who follows android phones everywhere (1), and thus has more data, and better maps.
1) "Google has been tracking Android users even with location services turned off": https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-tr...
I will not, with any alternative, use it again.
In one case it was a 15min drive to the correct location on the other side of a mesa, which popped up on G-Maps immediately (the other was only a few miles away, but through ranch property).
I have found them to be fairly accurate in terms of roads and what not. Finding precise locations of addresses is hit or miss. Google and Bing have a huge head start there, but in my opinion are still full of inaccuracies. I have even found some things that google is just wrong but apple maps get it right. I'm obsessed with maps though, so I will spend hours comparing the results of google, apple and bing.
Other products have had it for years.
Still, I’m a happy user of Apple Maps. I dislike Google Maps and am thrilled to have a quality alternative.
What do you mean? It certainly stores your location history, albeit it's not as precise as Google Maps.
Gave it a few more chances but it kept doing the same thing. I'd put in McDonalds and it would give me a random McDonalds somewhere in America while I was looking for one in London. Decided if it was so badly developed that it can't search properly using an incredibly simple "pick the closest one to the user" criteria I'm not trusting it to navigate me when I'm walking, let alone driving.
Last time I used it was to navigate to the Chicago Botanical Gardens. Apple Maps told me I had arrived while I was still in the middle of the freeway.
Went back to Google Maps from there.