Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

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You might be!

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.

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