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I am the only person on Earth, I think, that has had 0 problems with Apple Maps (at least, in the past year). I have never aimed for Cleveland and ended up in the Atlantic; and I've never been late or gotten lost. I think I've disagreed with its shortcuts once or twice.

Not denying your bad Apple Maps experience - just, I have no idea why mine is so trouble-free because so many have bad ones.

(For calibration, I live in NoVA)

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Occasionally I'll rent a car that only has Apple's Car Play and have to use my work iPhone to navigate (gawd forbid Apple would let us use Google Maps on Car Play;).

My experience has been universally poor:

- it provides no instructions for major actual intersections. It thinks you're staying on same main road even when there's a confusing Y in front of the driver. I have constant moments of panic when I see the intersection coming and no help from the maps.

- It provides confusing instructions on straight roads ("Turn right in 100 meters" when there's a stretch of straight road)

- It'll reference names for a road that are nowhere near what any of the signs indicate

- "Keep in right three lanes to stay on the road" - when the rightmost lane is actually a turning lane

- Something that is admittedly tricky, it struggles to provide useful instructions on more than four-way roads (e.g. if it's a 5-way or 6-way, "Turn right" has multiple interpretations). It doesn't use, at least not in my cases "bear right" or "slight right" or similar vs "turn right" or "acute right" or "sharp right" - and again, it gets the road names wrong.

- When Searching:

* it'll show me Bedford England 5000km away, but not Bedford NS 12km away

* It has some weird internal naming so searching for actual address will again not lead me anywhere near to what I want

Basically it's been a constant source of frustration beyond what I believe could reasonably be attributed to my inexperience with its UI :-/

EDIT/UPDATE: Thx for feedback; my work phone is on iOS 11, good to know that (*recently, after 4 years without it) CarPlay now supports other maps; note that I don't think it in any way makes Apple Maps experience itself any better 0:-)

FYI CarPlay supports third party maps like Google as of September. https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/18/17875256/apple-ios-12-car...

Thanks! I heard that might be coming, I'll check if there's an update waiting on my work phone :)

The other thing I want to point out on reflection : Perhaps it's incorrect to claim Apple Maps are bad, as such. If I only used Apple Maps, I might think they're just fine! For me, it's only after using Google Maps that Apple Maps seems subpar.

So perhaps it's not that GoogleMaps are good, AppleMaps are bad. It's more that while AppleMaps are good/decent, GoogleMaps these days are miraculous - almost to the point of being unfair comparison.

Google Maps is great but nothing close to miraculous. I've had a ton of frustrations with it. Most recent one: just a couple days ago it told me to get off a bus and walk to the next bus stop when the bus was already going there and I had far more than enough time to catch the next leg of the trip.

> Occasionally I'll rent a car that only has Apple's Car Play and have to use my work iPhone to navigate (gawd forbid Apple would let us use Google Maps on Car Play;).

I don't own a car with Apple CarPlay, but a recent rental had it, and it worked perfectly with Google Maps.

I was in the back seat of a car when the co-pilot tried using Apple Maps to navigate in the Seattle area. I don't know how many times it'd pipe up with "Turn right on ____ Avenue" when we were in the left most lane, almost at the stop light, with 3 lanes of full traffic to our right.

There was pre-action mention of "Turn right in 500 feet". The driver was so frustrated with it, I finally turned on Google Maps and made the co-pilot turn off Apple Maps.

On the interstate, Google mentions "In 2 miles, take Exit 17 to Middleton", "In point 5 miles, take Exit 17", and "Take Exit 17".

Additionally, I don't know if it had the lane indicator Google Maps puts up at the top [1]. You could feel the tension rise in the car as we tried getting to the various destinations throughout the week.

[1] https://www.techlicious.com/images/phones/google-maps-screen...

I've actually found Apple Maps navigation when driving (though not just for looking up stuff) generally better than Google's in most of the above situations — particularly with regard to getting in the correct lane, multi-exit roundabouts (Ireland!!), and warnings for upcoming turns at the correct times.

Apple Maps did route me up a to the top of a mountain on a single-lane two-way road in France, but I had "avoid tolls" enabled so it might have been my fault. Can't say it wasn't scenic though.

The search, however, is absurd! It does constantly return places on the other side of the planet! And God-forbid you misspell anything by a single character. I wish there was a plugin for Apple products that would just return the "Did You Mean" result from a Google search. I'd gladly trade a little bit of privacy for crowdsourced spellcheck at this point.

> gawd forbid Apple would let us use Google Maps on Car Play

They do support third party navigation now

https://www.apple.com/ios/carplay

Yup, Waze works as well and supports confirming and pinning reports.

Is there a UK restriction in place? In the US google maps (and waze) both work fine over carplay, map on the car screen and all.

How often do you miss a turn?

Perhaps there's a setting I've missed, but for me Apple Maps seems to "lock" onto a particular route, and if I miss a direction it'll keep trying to get me back onto that route no matter how convoluted it would be, rather than updating to the new 'best route' like Google Maps usually manages.

Other than that, which I recognize as partially user error, Apple Maps works at least as well as Google. If anything I like their routing better... so long as there's no unexpected issues.

Same for me and I've used Apple Maps all over the US. Although there have been instances of Google Maps finding something Apple Maps couldn't, I've never actually gotten wrong directions.

I used to have a lot of problems with Apple Maps, but they've gotten a lot better over the years.

That said - there is a lot of feature parity that Apple Maps does not meet Google Maps on (i.e. - searching for something along your route is near impossible on Apple Maps, whereas that's a natural seamless integration on Google Maps).

Additionally, and this might be just because I'm more used to Google Maps, but the UI is way easier to follow in Google Maps - it feels more natural and in-sync with my actual position as a driver. If I have to turn off an intersection, I sometimes feel like I'm guessing if it's the right exit with Apple Maps, but never have such confusion on Google's.

Lastly - and this is also certainly anecdotal, but almost always Google Maps estimates are far more accurate for me than Apple Maps. Apple Maps has several times taken me a different route than Google Maps to my work, only for it to take another 5-10 minutes than normal. I've tried it several times and it just doesn't match up.

Apple Maps sometimes feels closer to a burden to bear since I've chosen Apple for so much - I wish it worked as well dearly, since Apple tries to make you use it so often, but because of the experience I'm much more willing to copy an address and paste it myself into Google Maps than get that sweet integrated sensation I crave.

> If I have to turn off an intersection, I sometimes feel like I'm guessing if it's the right exit with Apple Maps, but never have such confusion on Google's.

Happens to me on Google, but I don't have Apple to compare it with. But I definitely do miss or take the wrong turns because of this.

I also find Apple Maps perfectly adequate for navigation around urban areas and some less urban areas as well, in USA and Europe. I found google maps better (but still not that great) in some more remote parts of Russia.

The two companies have different approaches to businesses, landmarks. I find Apple much better for places I"m familiar with -- generally has the info I am looking for without as much noise. But when I'm a tourist in someplace unfamiliar I find google clearer so far.

Did you try Yandex Maps for Russia?

Yes, and indeed they were generally better than the two American choices.

I'm not familiar with Nova. Is that short for Nova Scotia?

Northern Virginia/DC Suburbs and by extension, everything north of Quantico and north as far, as, I dunno, Gaithersburg in MD to the north.

Some of the worst traffic in the country, and absolutely awful roads.

Northern Virginia

Probably Northern Virginia.

When we bought our newly built home in bay area 5 years ago, it took Apple maps 3 years to find it correctly. So many people went to wrong address as they did not follow my advise to use google maps. Apple maps auto-corrected the address to another place ~10 miles away.

Other than that, I did not have much issues.

I've never had any issues with it locally, and in fact I like it better than Google Maps in a lot of subtle little UX ways BUT I live less than 10 miles from Cupertino so it'd be crazy if they weren't really accurate here. I was in China a few weeks ago, where Google Maps is blocked, and was very impressed with the quality of the maps even in quite remote areas. Having access to reliable English/Pinyin maps in China is a new experience for me. On the other hand, in my travels to Mexico and even some rural parts of the US, I have seen a lack of detail in their maps compared to Google's.

The Uber/Lyft app dependency on Google is surprising but probably shouldn't be. I wonder/hope it's different on iOS?

Apple Maps is the way to go in China, unless you read Chinese and can use one of the local apps. Apple have done a great job here.

Apple was really slow to the party on transit directions. And it doesn't have biking directions. For me driving trips are less than 20% of my trips so not having both transit and biking is a deal breaker.

I do like the parking spot rememberer though.

Apple maps has taken me to the wrong side of Tokyo more than once. I won't use it anymore. I'm in Nova now, perhaps it's better here due to more data being available? I've never tried it here and probably won't -- there's nothing Waze won't do for me that Apple Maps will.

No, you're not. I travel a lot in Asia and never had any problems with Apple Maps. It's been my main navigation system for more than a year.

The only complaint I might have is absence of certain venues/places that GoogleMap has, but this is something I can live with, putting privacy first.

I was in Dallas once, tried to get to the Dallas Zoo. Apple Maps couldn't get me there to save its life. I had to use Google Maps because Dallas decided to put exits inside of exits on the highway and Apple Maps would spit out the name of the second exit instead of what it was really called.

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