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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

I would say map quality for someone living outside of the "bubble", map quality goes as follows:

TomTom then Google Maps then literally anything else, then Apple Maps at the very end. It's hilarious how empty Apple Maps are, and considering that until very recently they were the only option for Apple CarPlay for navigation, that was extremely bad. Seriously, it was so bad that I would consider my car's built-in, shitty 5-year old sat nav system over using Apple Maps, it's that bad. Google Maps is still lacking in many many aspects(it has no idea which streets are one way, has no idea about no-left/right turn signs, it still connects roads on the map which are not connected in reality, its database of POI is lackluster at best - TomTom doesn't seem to have any of those issues), but god, Apple Maps outside of US is just bad.

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Not in the Netherlands.

Here any in-car navigation - even in my wife's 1 year old Seat Leon - is never as up-to-date as either of the major native Maps apps (Google or Apple). I exclusively use Apple Maps for navigating in the Netherlands (and elsewhere in Europe). I can count on one hand the number of times it's led us astray.

In fact, I think more like two fingers. The one time that stands out is navigating through back country in Croatia this summer. Both Apple Maps and Google Maps seemed to think a road existed that simply wasn't there, causing a massive detour to get home.

Otherwise, my experience of Apple Maps is completely the opposite to yours. Where have you been using it?

Edit: Also, OpenStreetMap is the best Maps data for anything off major roads here in Europe - it beats Apple and Google by a country mile. If you're going hiking or mountain climbing, OSM is much better.

Speed limits shown by in-car navigation are an excellent indicator how outdated the data is.

I would say map quality for someone living outside of the "bubble", map quality goes as follows:

TomTom then Google Maps then literally anything else, then Apple Maps at the very end.

Apple Maps uses TomTom data [1]. This is also our experience with driving in Germany and The Netherlands. Apple Maps is very complete and had better lane guidance than Google Maps (when we switched from Google Maps to Apple Maps when getting CarPlay). We never had problems with Apple Maps in these countries, nor Austria and Switzerland.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-tomtom/apple-rebuil...

It literally boggles my mind why Apple still think using Yelp for POI data is a good idea.

Yelp to all intents and purposes does not exist outside of the continental Americas. London's Yelp data is essentially the work of the odd bored American tourist. As such, it's totally wrong.

I do not see how Apple improves this situation from this article. Google have an amazing advantage here.

>It literally boggles my mind why Apple still think using Yelp for POI data is a good idea.

As opposed to what source of readily available data?

They already use several sources anyway (including their own scanning), Yelp is just one of many.

Foursquare would be a better source as that is still popular in many European countries.

They use Foursquare.

They don’t work exclusively with yelp. Here in France they also include POI from "The Yellow Pages" which is the historical phone directory editor.

I guess they made similar local partnership for country in wich such directory is available and open to partnership.

I’m a GIS engineer and I once considered joining Apple so I’ve regularly noticed international job offers from Apple about enabling theses partnership.

They appear to use FourSquare, TripAdvisor and other sources in London, not (just?) Yelp

I would also like Google Maps to pronounce streetnames in the local language. It knows the street is (for example) in France. So please pronounce the name in French, instead of English. Maybe I do not understand French, but whatever their English pronunciation makes of it is equally unclear... At least the French version in the correct one...

From my experience Apple Maps quality depends on local providers. Maps are really good in Japan or China and terrible in Thailand or many other places.

I don't know about Japan, but in China Apple maps is far behind Google maps (which isn't even accessible for to most people there), let alone Baidu maps which is much more detailed than either.

Hmm, for google maps not knowing which streets are one-way - that is not true for Switzerland. Sending you to streets that you can't enter (and have to suddenly find ways around in heavy traffic) would render any city navigation effectively useless for me, and outright dangerous too.

It definitely works, at least I can confirm for bigger cities. Hopefully your (and other) areas will get updated soon with something as crucial.

It does however struggle with no-left/right turn signs, at least in Zürich it seems to ignore them.

in the UK Apple Maps certainly isn't empty, and actually remains my map of choice on Carplay just because of the better voice integration at the moment.

for driving Waze is number 1 for me

Waze is usually my go-to in the UK. Works very well in cities, at least.

I did have a hilarious issue for a while where it didn't know about either of the Severn River crossings into Wales (and yeah I didn't have it set to avoid toll roads). Not only did it not know about the "new" bridge, which is something like 20 years old, it didn't even know about the "old" bridge :D

The sodding thing used to try to take me via Gloucester (+2 hours to the trip) and didn't have any idea what was going on when I was on the bridge it didn't believe in.

Thankfully this is now fixed!

I mostly agree. The biggest problems with Waze are when it puts a three mile detour to turn around, and that it struggles to find a whole host of places compared to Apple/Google. Particularly small out of the way places. It just doesn’t have the granularity of smaller back roads.

You hit the nail on the head. Same exact 2 issues for me; it SUCKS at back-roads and shortcuts, and if you make a wrong turn instead of re-adjusting the route it will often have you turn around, even if you are driving for a mile toward the destination.

My setup is to punch in my destination and let Google audibly give directions, and then open Waze for hazard/police notifications.

Waze doesn't even exist outside of the US.

Edit: Ok, this is wrong, sorry. I searched for "Waze UK" on google and the first result just takes me to the US site.

What? It does, a lot of people in The Netherlands use it. That probably means it's available in most developed countries.

Where did you get that nonsense? I use it all the time in the UK and there are always tonnes of other users on the map. It ALWAYS knows about broken down vehicles, etc that users report. So I'd say its pretty well used outside of the US.

Waze wasn’t even created in the US. It was an Israeli company (until Google bought it. I’m not sure what the structure looks like now and if it is developed independently).

Eastern Europe, using it every day for traffic and road alerts, extremely convenient.

I have no issues with Waze in the UK

False

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