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Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

Personally - I find Apple maps (now, not at all in the early days) much better than Google maps - except for one thing: On several occasions where I enter a street address and if it's in a heavily populated area particularly if it's on an intersection the pointer will be in the wrong place on the street - I've reported these when I've encountered them and Apple has fixed each one within 24-48 hours but it's still a bit annoying when it does happen. My guessing is that because Google farms a tremendous amount of public and private data from Android devices and Google searches / services they are able to use their privately held wealth of peoples information to improve street numbering especially when new roads are added or intersections have been changed - that combined with Google maps being 14 years old and Apple maps only being 7. Still, a sensible move for a privacy focused system I believe.

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One thing Google Maps does have that I don't think Apple Maps has is crowd sourced edits. You can actually propose edits to Google Maps as a user. It's especially prominent with business information, but it is even possible to adjust road geometry.

There is a reporting tool on both iOS/macOS Maps and you can input suggested edit such as displacing POI to its correct position.

Used that in the past and got a notification when suggestion was accepted & pushed to the map.

I’d guess it’s curated somehow.

Apple Maps allows this, at least on macOS. I've never looked for the option on iOS but I assume it's there somewhere too.

You can do that with Apple Maps as well, I can't say "always" but for a long time at least, though I can't speak for how fast they'll necessarily deal with it. But if you set a marker then there will be a "Report an Issue" button down below at the bottom of its info panel/pane. Amongst the options there is "Add a Place" which can also be a street, and there is a free form "Other Issue" (which you can attach a photo to as well) catch-all. I don't think Apple has any more advanced stuff like user proposed road geometry editing, which is too bad because it's painfully obvious where some simple algorithm has worked off a satellite image vs it having some human attention.

But there is definitely some edit crowd sourcing, it may just suffer from a smaller or less motivated user base. Speaking of the latter, I've never seen Apple really try to incentivize it either, whereas at least at one point Google had a fairly fleshed out actual gamification for Google Maps where people could sign up to be "Local Guides", earn points for constructive actions, and get badges that could be publicly displayed. Essentially free for Google (dunno if they ever gave anything else to top editors for PR, but they didn't promise it) but even simple public recognition of an icon can be surprisingly motivating for a lot of people. I don't know how active that still is and also vaguely remember stories about editing tools getting shut down a few years back, but at any rate Apple has never really tried anything like that at all AFAIK. Not that as a corporate culture they've ever really gotten gaming, period.

Good to know. Has this really been around for that long? I swear I was reading about this as an issue for Apple Maps just recently.

We should probably quantify "long", I know it's been a few years at least because I added a couple of businesses myself. But I guess it's already been well over 6 years since Apple Maps' initial launch (how time flies!), and there have been plenty of changes since then, so you could well argue even a few years isn't that long in the scale of the thing. And the 1.0 launch sure was rough a heck, not many such things where there has to be a public apology given let alone from Apple. Some of their initial ideas for how it would develop (with heavy 3rd party dev involvement for example) never really seemed to work out, and they've become more, "traditional" I guess over time in terms of data sources and doing the grunt work themselves (IIRC they started doing their own sensor vans for example like in 2015/2016?). At any rate though it's there now and has been for a bit, it's in the Mac version as well and I can see it even in older ones.

Having said all that, I just checked some of the entries I made way back when, which I did with full write ups, my source, photos, and in one case I was in fact the business head of IT and provided that from my work email and a device on our business Apple ID even. And I'm positive those were accepted and on the map for at least 6 months while I was still there. Yet now I look and nothing, and they definitely are still in business at the same location. That's kind of a crappy. If Apple accepts user submissions but then blows them away from time to time during map source fusion say it could explain some of their paucity of data and would discourage more submissions from those few who bothered in the first place.

I've had the same issue with locations on google maps a few times and iirc it's taken a bit longer than that.

What I really hate are mall locations. I wish pin markers put the actual stores in the right portion of the building(s) themselves... hate parking on the wrong side of the complex to find out that I parked on the wrong side. Increase that to when the temperatures are more extreme (under 40F in the north or over 100F in the southwest).

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