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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

I started using Apple Maps when I bought my new car which has CarPlay. (You currently can't use other nav apps with CarPlay, but you will be able to with iOS 12.)

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.

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A lot of those users complaining are probably not US based.

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I prefer Apple Maps' UX, but their data is either outdated or just plain wrong at times, which makes it effectively useless for a lot of things I now use Google Maps for.

100% agree. I'm in the Netherlands (Europe, next to Germany) and live in a city with a population of ~120000 people. I often don't find places in Apple Maps, even in the middle of the city. Google Maps just finds everything.

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 used it very recently to get to two separate trail heads in Arizona. Both of them are used by hundreds of people a day and are otherwise well marked. Using Apple Maps I was both times led to dead-end dirt roads or Posted (trespass) private property gates that were miles from the correct location. Had I been hiking, it would have been quite unsafe.

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 used it recently and the maps continue to be inaccurate in the New England states. I'm so glad CarPlay is supporting other mapping apps in iOS 12.

inaccurate in what ways?

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.

This might be the 'feature' that finally brings me to use an iphone instead of android. The lack of this kind of customization has kept me away from iOS until now.

The lane guidance is great, but sadly it was added in iOS 11.

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.

Apple maps has some good features I use. It's great for finding your car in a big parking lot and it's integration with Open Table and Weather is also nice.

>I appreciate that it's the only major nav app that doesn't constantly record my position in the cloud.

What do you mean? It certainly stores your location history, albeit it's not as precise as Google Maps.

Your location history is stored on the device and never uploaded.

You're telling me that it pulls maps without tell Apple where it is? If it tells Apple where it is, then the location history exists, almost certainly at least for fraud / security uses.

Yeah, Apple needs a start and end to create the route, but they don't need to store your location on their servers to do that.

You misread what I said. Obviously your phone has to tell Apple where it is, but Apple does not record that information after the fact.

I believe all requests made to the Apple Maps service does the same thing Siri requests do and cycle through brand new unique identifiers every 15 minutes, making it so Apple can’t identify requests made over more than a few minutes as coming from the same device (and it includes no other identifying information).

Not that I’m concerned about this “vulnerability,” but surely for navigation trips longer than 15 minutes it would be easy to correlate requests to a single user, given that each request probably needs to include the origin and destination and those are probably unique to one user at any given time.

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