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Comment by akmarinov | Hacker News Reader

Apple is so far behind outside of the places they prioritize that it'll take decades at this pace to get on Google Maps' current level.

It's really useless in places like Eastern Europe, where Apple has no interest in supporting and isn't likely that it'll turn that around any time soon.

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Mapy.cz is far better than Google in case of Slovakia or Czech Republic. They have full coverage of high resolution pictures taken from planes and not satellites. Also these contain all the hiking, cycling and other routes. The native Android and iOS apps work great and support offline maps - you can download the whole map for a country with one click. Google Maps is unusable for sport or hiking because you only see a large green blob instead of the terrain with contour lines with altitude markings, all trails and roads and POI. Yes, Mapy.cz can't compete with car navigation, but everything else is miles better (and navigation on foot is better too).

Google Maps just isn't very good for hiking. But it's not just a map, it's got the yellow pages, Yelp, and, depending on where you are, various other things like hotel booking and public transport routing thrown in. My recent favorite feature is the live estimation of how crowded a store is, very useful during the pandemic.

Much of this is stuff the software based on OSM isn't even trying, or doing so only very half heartedly, as far as I am aware. On the flipside, OSM is, in many places, peerless in its core competency, a detailed map that everyone can use.

To be fair the crowded functionality in a map is something only Google could pull of since they are tracking all phones and locations. And it still has a bunch of restaurants listed in my neighbourhood that is clearly only containing rental houses and very outdated roads compared to Openstreetmaps.

> My recent favorite feature is the live estimation of how crowded a store is, very useful during the pandemic.

Unfortunately it's been completely useless in my area. I wish stores just allowed access to the cctv cameras on their parking lots so I could estimate for myself.

That’s valuable data for sale by other vendors.

What vendors are in this business?

Foursquare, but not with parking lot data, to my knowledge:

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/alternative-data-future-...

Satellite image companies sell this type of alternative data to buyers:

https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/how-hedge-funds-use-satel...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/stock-v...

Some of the vendors are RS Metrics, Descartes Labs and Orbital Insight.

Unfortunate that none of these, even when purchased, would be a substitute for actually looking at the parking lot in real time.

In the US, I use AllTrails for hiking, which I think is built on Mapbox. Hiking, hunting, fishing, running, biking—all interesting examples of niche uses for maps that naturally lend themselves to separate user experiences.

Mapy.cz covers most of other use cases as well, including business info, public transport and other details. I personally find mapy.cz more tailored to pedestrian/public transport navigation within european city. The only feature which I go to google maps is the mentioned estimation of how crowded a place is (as this comes from android data, and google has an clear edge there).

The software supports the use cases but the data isn't there. Certainly for where I'm living. Most of the information is missing -- eg apparently there are no pediatricians in my city, many opening times are missing, in my area there are no photos, no reviews; other stuff is wrong. It's more comprehensive in Prague, though from a brief look Google still has more of everything.

I'm not saying that OSM (and other projects, but particularly OSM) can't catch up, especially when it comes to factual information. It has already shown that crowdsourcing can do better than Google at pure mapping.

Does OSM support address-based resolution of places? AFAIK, Google is getting things like store hours when it crawls websites. Which, of course, it's doing anyway for indexing. As long as it can figure out the address and the store hours from the website, it can put them on the map.

In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience. If I could resolve addresses to places in OSM, then I could easily write some scrappers to help out with filling in other data.

Addresses and exact shop locations can be added to OSM.

See https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/50.07298/19.93528 where it is mapped at least in a small part.

> then I could easily write some scrappers to help out with filling in other data.

Note that it may not possible due to copyright issues

I'm not talking about adding addresses to OSM. I'm talking about resolving features based on address. "Give me the building at address (____), because I know that's a business and I can fill in additional information."

I quickly found this: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim

E.g.: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/search.html?q=pilking...

> In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience.

As @matkoniecz pointed out, OSM is quite capable of having place addresses mapped to a specific spot. If your experience has been that they are missing, then that is most likely because no one has added them to OSM for the area's in which you have looked.

But the good part about OSM is that anyone, including you, can add those details, and they appear in the main map within seconds to minutes of someone adding them. So you could help rectify the missing situation by adding some of that missing data.

If you don't want to learn all the OSM details, and provided some background details are present (generally building outlines for address data questions) one easier way to help add the data is via StreetComplete (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete). It asks simple questions, you enter the answer, and the app handles the low-level OSM tagging changes based upon the answer given.

I do contribute in my local area. But I'm talking about entire suburban cities with no addresses on any of the houses. It would take me months to verify all the addresses and enter them manually. My county property appraiser does offer some data files, but I haven't yet written any tests to see whether it's enough to reliably populate addresses into OSM.

Just tested for Germany (where I am living currently) and it is not very good: at the map level it shows the correct street number but it seems unable to use it for actual route planning (i.e. if you are in a street with numbers from 1 to 200 it seems to always calculate your arrival point at #1 even if you specificy that you are looking for "72/b").

Also, is it available as an app on iPhone?

Yes, it's available on iPhone. The company is based in Czech republic and originally they were focused on Czech and Slovak market, but they cover the whole world. I haven't tried the navigation, I only use it mostly for navigation outside of cities for hiking - I can have the whole tourist map in my pocket and offline at any time.

> Google Maps just isn't very good for hiking

I find openstreetmap.org to be great for showing hiking trails. At least for my local area.

I've spent a ton of time mapping out trails in my region on openstreetmap. I've found the issue now is the interface. The map data is only good if it can be easily read.

I'm starting to look at workflows for taking osm trail data and trying to make nice maps, but wow it is not easy to do!

Thanks! I use mapy.cz for everything, but my main reason are the hiking routes. I've contibuted some routes also (and city data using streetComplete), but certainly not a ton.

Agreed. It has the potential to be best bar none for this. Where it isn't, it is probably only a matter of time.

Another big issue I've had with using Google Maps for outdoor trips is their awful offline sattelite map saving. There is no way to specify which layers to save and the level Google chooses could be anywhere from decent to utterly unusable. I've had saved maps that turned into blurry blobs the minute I lost phone service countless times.

I eventually gave up on using it and switched to a proper topo map app that actually lets me set the offline resolution and it has been vastly better.

>They have full coverage of high resolution pictures taken from planes and not satellites

...as opposed to google maps not using aerial photography? AFAIK most urban "satellite" picture on google maps is also taken with planes.

Wow, you weren't kidding. Poking around real quick, the aerial imagery is super high resolution, on par with what you'd get with a consumer-grade drone flyover.

That is true, it's an order of magnitude of difference. For example, look at this location:

https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=13.8929744&y=50.0331743&z=14...

And compare it to Google Maps:

https://www.google.com/maps/@50.0297578,13.8901237,13.85z

Google Maps is substantially better at search and places data but this advantage is slowly shrinking.

Also, Mapy.cz has a tracker feature with online sync and gpx export.

Also in central Europe. Maps and navigation in the Croatian countryside is comically broken. Not only are the locations of addresses way off, if you travel to that location, they'll then send you somewhere else and eventually in a circle.

Maybe they don't care about poor countries with lower usage, but I'd be embarrassed to have that in my product.

Having said that, rich western Europe is in some ways no better. If you create a public transport route, Google maps will send you walking hundreds of meters around non-existent barriers, or sometimes insist that you go one tram stop past and then catch the tram back to the stop you want to go to.

Maps, like search seems to be slowly suffering from some sort of corporate rot over at Google.

Can't speak about Eastern Europe, but here in the Netherlands the public transport with Google Maps is really good. Including live-timing as to when your tram will arrive.

I have no problem with that, it works fine for me too, but public transport routing here (the actual mapping functionality) in Den Haag is broken and has been for years.

Even when I don't encounter obvious bugs, Google serves up illogical routes.

Google map is amazing in India (a poor country albeit with higher usage).

It is not uncommon to see cab or auto (tuk-tuk) drivers use smartphones to navigate the city roads.

Map technology in general has become a great leveller, where it enables outsider to start driving cabs in complex cities roads (which otherwise would be almost impossible without direction from passenger).

A year ago I would have agreed, but I am now more optimistic. They recently launched a huge update for Canada that has made it competitive with Google Maps, and their "Look Around" is a lot more impressive than Street View in my experience with it.

Like the article states, the pace of their updates is increasing. While it may still be a while until they support the rest of the world, the fact that somebody there seems to finally understand people use iPhones in places other than the Bay Area is promising.

Google Maps is not that great in places they don’t prioritize. They have no ability to handle tolls and direction of roads that are based on day of the week and hour. Local examples from the DC Area: I-66 is marked as a toll road 100% of the time despite only being tolled at rush hour in one direction; Clara Barton parkway is always marked as two way, but it becomes one way during rush hour, I regularly am routed down it by Google maps when it is one way the opposite direction.

I frequently am sent down nonexistent roads in rural Massachusetts, meanwhile there is a paved road in Bristol, NH that Google refuses to route people on; it is used by Apple Maps.

I'm located in NoVA and I've noticed this as well. It seems like instead of having the option "Avoid Tolls" it needs to be "Avoid Tolls when I have to Pay".

In Eastern Europe being eaten by OpenStreetMap is plausible.

For example, see random part of Poland: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/52.1081/21.1167

Main power of Google is live traffic data.

> Main power of Google is live traffic data.

Does Google not rely on Waze for this?

Granted, Google now owns Waze, but they may have an API.....

> ...it'll take decades ...

I'm very literal.

Google maps was released in 2005. The upper limit on how long it would take Apple to build the whole thing from literally nothing is 15 years, if they are investing to improve their service.

Let alone with computer vision, satellite imagery, hardware improvements and the ability to lazily copy the interface Google has created which would speed the process up.

The fact that it took company X 15 years to do something does not mean that 15 years is upper limit for other companies. Not saying it would take more or less, but just seeing it ad an upper limit makes no sense to me.

Of someone at Apple copied the Google interface they'd be fired for substandard results.

> if they are investing to improve their service

You’re hinting at the same thing here, but you ignored the key phrase ”at this pace” in the OP’s comment.

Even Usain Bolt won’t do an impressive 100 meters run if he’s walking.

In Easter Europe even Google Maps are much worse that OpenStreetMaps.

Here maps is good too. I'm always amazed how it consistently gets the speed limit right even in sparsely populated areas and small towns, where the speed limit often changes literally every 50 meters.

If someone is interested in mapping this kind of things in OpenStreetMap (used by mapy.cz outside Czech Republic) - I recommend StreetComplete (max speed quest must be enabled in settings, it is disabled by default)

I'm not sure "much worse", maybe worse, but yet comparable and still useful. Apple Maps, on the other hand... sheesh.

I live in northern Europe (Sweden) at at least in my specific area OpenStreetMap is a lot better than Google maps.

I also live in Sweden and do a lot of GIS analysis with both OSM data and other providers. OSM is great when it comes to the actual road geometry (esp. bike and pedestrian roads), although it often gets the speed limits wrong. For pedestrian travel analysis I'd say it's the best dateset available, since it includes all those 'unofficial' paths that everybody uses, but are often left off official maps. It is however pretty terrible when it comes to buildings and addresses. You don't have to get many km out from major cities before a lot of buildings are missing, and the numbering of buildings is often either missing or wrong.

> You don't have to get many km out from major cities before a lot of buildings are missing, and the numbering of buildings is often either missing or wrong.

I am working on a project where I have noticed the same problem with several providers. What provider do you recommend for geocoding when this stuff needs to be right most of the time? Bing API seems somewhat OK. Google Maps API seems like the best, but comes with insane terms and conditions.

Yea, I agree that the Bing API is pretty OK and Google seems slightly better. However for Sweden I would probably go with Hitta or Eniro, since they specialize in the Swedish market, however neither has a free API. Likewise if I only need data for a handful of countries (and am willing to pay) I would first look if there are companies that specialize in those countries, since that data tends to be better than the places that provide global Geocoding.

Apple is behind, yes, but you overestimate how dependant many core services are towards Google Maps. Many Nordic services like transit apps and websites among others use either OSM with the country's own Land Survey's map data.

As long as Apple and competitors can a) have businesses add their locations easily and b) have public transit companies' timetables in their system, they are already within arm's reach of GMaps.

imo for the 95%-task of get-me-to-this-address i find the apple routing actually superior to gmaps (in germany that is)

I thought that's because Google stopped doing street view because of German privacy laws. Without the street view cars roaming around there's a lot less street level data to be had.

I'm not sure how important Streetview is for street level data. I was always under the impression that "paved" (or similar) streets were pretty easy to get right (and can possibly be obtained from a governmental agency?). For smaller footpaths I always assumed that they were using movement data (the same they use for traffic forecasting) to detect where they are.

They also resumed Streetview in parts of Germany this year, and I'm not sure they ever fully stopped running them for private data collection.

I figured they had a tracker on the cars that would produce actively captured data that could be compared to phone data to understand what roads are around, etc.

They do feature extraction; store names, addresses, traffic controls, etc.

> I'm not sure how important Streetview is for street level data.

Streetview imagery is mined for address information from signs/plaques on buildings. Operating hours and names of businesses can be determined via OCR

Apple seems to want to expand its (primarily) iPhone market in India, and yet Apple Maps is still far behind Google Maps here even in larger cities. There was news a few years ago about investing in maps, but that hasn’t shown as much improvement as one would expect. Google Maps adapts and improves a lot faster (partially thanks to millions of Android devices reporting location data all the time).

I don’t think Apple is very serious about Maps. If it is, it’s certainly not investing much into it except for Bay Area and a few major cities in the U.S. Apple Maps is more of a hobby for Apple, like Apple News (which is still only in a handful of countries several years after launch) and some other products (like Apple TV) and services.

Tokyo coverage is also not very good in comparison with Google Maps unfortunately. Considered moving over but the combination of poor search results and the lack of ability to move my places from Google to Apple Maps means it won't be my focus any time soon.

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