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Comment by nr2x | Hacker News Reader

I wanted Apple Maps to succeed so I’ve been using it from day one. It’s gotten much, much better. That said, if I’m going on a long trip where a non-optimal route is a big deal, I’ll double check with google maps and often (but not always) find a better route.

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I also _want_ to like Apple Maps. But I always need to double check business hours using Google.

I usually check the store's site or call. I've had enough entries on Google be wrong to blindly trusy it either.

Store sites tend to be less reliable than Google. Just last night I was searching one and the website had been out of date for months and yet Google had it right.

I've seen that divergence go both ways. Of course, neither source is as reliable as calling (if you get a human to answer), as much of a hassle as calling can sometimes be.

I actually don’t really trust business hours on google anymore, I have to go to the restaurant directly or just call since I’ve been burned so many times looking forward to dumplings/teriyaki/pizza and then having the restaurant be closed.

This has become an even bigger problem recently, with COVID forcing businesses to suddenly change their hours.

Stores don’t even bother to fix their own signage when they change their hours. You’d pretty much have to crowdsource it.

Its a pretty hard problem. Businesses typically only list their opening hours on the door and then those are prone to change without notice. Planned to go somewhere for lunch and needed to check in to a train station in an hour, turns out the lunch place decided today they open half an hour late so I had to quickly rush somewhere else.

If google could deploy that tech demo that calls a business on public holidays to check if they are open, that would be amazing.

Hmm. At least in the US, Apple Maps gets their business info from Yelp, so it tends to be about as reliable as Yelp is. In general I find Yelp to be mostly on point -- not perfect, but not worse on the whole than Google.

In my experience, I find Google business hours to be more accurate than Yelp. Not sure why, but I think restaurants find Google easier or more important to update when they adjust their hours slightly.

On Apple maps day one I was an iPhone user living in Tokyo and Apple maps was like “what are trains? Here’s a 20 mile driving route through Tokyo”. Google maps was gone and I’m not sure whether to its on Apple or Google but my ability to get around was impaired significantly.

I was an iPhone user living in Tokyo and Apple maps was like “what are trains?

Apple Maps has had Tokyo transit data since 2016.

Tokyo got transit data years before many other cities.

The Apple maps debut in 2012 was when Google maps was removed from the Apple store. Maybe there was a way for Apple maps to do train/subway directions then but the UI was ridiculously bad- giant stations equivalent to Grand Central were hardly visible and highway names were highlighted.

>Google maps was removed from the Apple store

They actually removed it entirely? You couldn't install google maps in any way?

It wasn’t that Apple removed Google Maps from App Store. Maps.app on iPhone were using Google Maps data prior to iOS 6. Google Maps the app didn’t existed when Apple switched to use Apple Maps.

Timeline:

Sep 19, 2012 - iOS 6

Dec 13, 2012 - Google Maps launched on App Store

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