Hacker News Reader

Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

Maps has been awful and getting worse for a long time.

If it's not routing me 25+ miles further to save "1 minute" (really a multi-minute slowdown in the 90th percentile) then its failing to give comprehensible directions in order to interpose business names.

Maybe the monetization is finally makes competing with it attractive enough.

View on HN

And the app has become absolutely atrocious performance-wise. It used to load nearly immediately, but starting ~1.5 years ago I began noticing extreme slowdowns. Now it's barely functional for me. Every part of the UI is appallingly unresponsive -- taps that take 5 seconds to register, hitches in animation, etc. From tapping on the icon to being able to get underway (including typing in an address) used to be about five seconds or less. Now it's upwards of thirty.

This coming change to their monetization (really? mining our location data isn't enough?) is just going to be the final impetus I need to find some other solution.

On my old iPhone the performance is still fine, but the volume controls have been broken for ages. Basically you can only change the volume while it is speaking (otherwise it changes the ringer volume). So you have to guess when the phone is speaking and then smash the volume up button in the hopes that you guessed correctly. And of course you have to do this blind because you're driving at the time to trigger the turn prompt. Very annoying.

Settings -> Sounds & Haptics -> Change With Buttons: OFF. Now the volume controls will only ever change the audio volume and never the ringer volume.

FYI, if you are using an android, you can try google maps go which is designed to run on devices with limited memory [0].

[0]: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/7566112?hl=en

Thanks, I remember seeing this before but assumed it was a junk copy-cat app.

The list of features it doesn't support is exactly the same list of things I don't care about. Nice! I just installed, and it seems to be a minimal app using a chrome wrapper. So it's basically a webpage... I will have to see how its navigation works.

Offline maps has always been a sticking point for me, I consider offline maps to be pretty core functionality for any map app.

I've noticed this too. I think it applies to most of their apps. I've had an issue since early April where a certain gmail account crashes the mail app (one account out of four only - it's not just me with this issue https://support.google.com/mail/thread/3994942).

The only fix is to remove all updates and revert to the original version of the app, and the UI experience is so much better. I'd forgotten how fast it was. I might just keep it like this.

What killed GMaps for me was the dogged insistence that the correct route through the city involves making left turns onto busy multilane roads at rush hour from a side street with a stop sign, just to avoid a half-block of stopped traffic waiting for a left turn signal.

On the other hand I was on the interstate the other day and it told me to get off and take a detour, I ended up avoiding a massive backup. I don't always take the advice, but man I like having the opportunity.

Waze tells me that stuff too. About an hour before I would have arrived at a major accident, it had notified me about a detour onto a parallel highway I should take. As I got closer, it told me to take an earlier exit because the original one was starting to get backed up from people trying to detour. I got off the highway and got back on with only a minute delay in my ETA.

I usually switch between Google Maps and Waze depending on where I'm going and how soon I want to get there. Google Maps if I'm in no hurry and want to take the "normal" way. Waze for if I'm trying to get there sooner (speed trap alerts and shortcuts help) and I'm either somewhat familar with the route or don't care about the stupid shortcuts. Waze has had me cut through neighborhoods and drive down gravel access roads to shave minutes off the travel time. Most of the time it pays off, sometimes you just end up wasting more time at intersections

Same. I ignored it once and got stuck in a traffic jam with construction that was there the week before.

It's just incredible that they don't offer an option to avoid left turns. This is something major freight carriers figured out a decade or more ago.

Interestingly I started using GMaps instead of Waze exactly for this. Waze loves sightseeing and meeting new people on cozy little streets.

This is configurable in Waze at least. There's a "Avoid difficult intersections" option in the Navigation settings.

Waze will take you on the shortest route - every time - even if that means cutting through a suburb taking the least amount of time to get to the destination. GMaps sticks to main roads as much as possible.

Do you mean rerouting? Google Maps is tuned differently than Waze, which caters to drivers looking to shave off minutes or even seconds. It tries to keep directions simple and easier to follow (e.g. not making a large number of turns), even if that means a slightly slower route. That was a deliberate product decision, at least until a few years ago.

What kind of incomprehensible directions and business names are you referring to?

Waze feels more like the R&D app for maps. It doesn't shave seconds or minutes off my time, but what it does do is constant A/B testing to see if another route could be faster. I know the area fairly well and I routinely ignore the route Waze wants to send me unless there is a clearly identified problem on the normal route, and when it re-routes to the path I chose, it's a minute or two shorter. Why did it try to send me down the slower route in the first place? Waze pulls this crap routinely.

> testing to see if another route could be faster [...] and when it re-routes to the path I chose, it's a minute or two shorter

Anecdotes != data, but I'm pretty sure I've experienced this with Google Maps as well.

You already have other mapping options like Garmin. And you don't have to pay much for them either. They are 100-300 bucks. They work pretty well... and could really use a boost in what seemed like a dying market.

> mapping options like Garmin

Except Garmin - having been decimated by Google and Apple maps - is getting pretty bad too. I've been using them for >15 years with multiple devices and every update lately seems to make their routing worse AND for some unfathomable reason makes the GPS reception less reliable (if I were a sceptic I'd suggest they are trying to force you to go for a new model via slowly crippling the device with every update).

What I wonder is why Google spends tons of CPU resources to calculate routes that would take me much longer to get where I'm going.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com