Ask HN: Is the quality of Google Maps going downhill? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is the quality of Google Maps going downhill?

30 pointssiva747 comments

I've had a few wrong direction this week in a major City given by Google Maps partly due to construction work. The low quality of UX on the iOS app also contributed to taking the wrong cues. Whereas i tried the same route on Apple Maps and it worked flawlessly. I have the impression that this is a recent development and i don't how it got so worse.

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I switched to Apple Maps a while ago. Google Maps kept directing me to take traffic shortcuts that might have saved 30 seconds but then required unprotected left turns across multi-lane roads (western U.S.). It got to where I had to inspect my next few turns at red lights to make sure it wasn't trying to be too "helpful." YMMV but I've been pretty happy with Apple Maps.

Edit: I forgot the name of the setting (no longer have GMaps on my phone) but I know there's a way to make it more or less aggressive. I did play with this before dropping GMaps but it had no effect.

I switched to the iPhone 13 when it launched and have been giving Apple Maps a chance. I have experienced more frustration with Apple Maps vs Google Maps. It seems to always think I am slightly farther back on the road than I really am, which is a huge negative for any map app.

I have never had that problem with Apple Maps; it's spot on, to the foot. Sounds like a GPS calibration error.

I encountered this recently when traveling in the Colorado mountains, it was definitely a GPS thing because I've never had the problem anywhere else (on the same phone).

I think this might be related to your use of Google Maps. I've primarily used Apple Maps for years now and whenever I use Google Maps I feel that it puts my locator dot too far ahead of where I am on the road so that I don't see my turn until it's too late.

Hah, agreed. There's one route in particular where Google consistently wants me to drive straight across a 5 lane road.

I switched to Apple Maps for the gentler routes, and the (IMO) more attractive UI when being displayed via CarPlay.

Same thing, Google Maps also keeps directing me to private roads and to cross through parking lots because there's a "connecting street" that's like 15' long

I live in a reasonably rural part of the UK in an old farmhouse with historic public rights of way criss-crossing the land around here. One day google decided that a footpath through a wooded area just wide enough for a quad was public highway and started giving driving directions through it. There's no place to turn, the gradient is steep and, once you're committed, the road surface is, errr, mud. Cue umpteen drivers getting stuck, panicing or grounding out on the occassionally fast flowing ford at the bottom.

I'm guessing image rec on some new satellite imagery convinced it it must be a road.

No amount of reporting a mapping problem to google has changed anything. When I reported something similar in Apple maps a couple of years ago, the change was reflected within a couple of weeks.

That sounds fun. Do you provide the tractor? (side business - little booth, with sign: Tows 50£ or a bottle of scotch.)

The main problem in NYC is that it never knows which direction you're facing when you get off the subway, and if you're visiting an unfamiliar area, you could walk a few blocks in the wrong direction before it/you figure it out.

Other than that, I did find that it got noticeably a lot slower a few years ago.

I can't hate though--I have never built anything remotely as complicated.

This is a problem that has a trivial non-technical solution that NYC should have implemented decades ago: Put a compass rose outside every subway station exit.

It's an obvious enough solution that some Chaotic Good souls took it upon themselves to spray-paint compass roses on the sidewalk outside a few stations in Brooklyn.

May I recommend contacting the Executive Director of NYC City Planning to suggest this be implemented officially by the city? A few minutes of effort by someone in NYC seems like it could have quite a bit of ongoing benefit to local citizens and travelers alike.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/about/email-the-director....

(not an NYC resident)

Oh yeah, that sounds like a great idea haha

Also, just making sure every intersection in Manhattan has street signs would be great. It's wild how many are missing either one or even both signs.

I have a couple issues with Google Maps on my iPhone over the last few months

1) it has trouble connecting to its own servers, leaving me in offline mode for an indeterminate amount of time, whereas Apple Maps was ready to go with live data. It seems Google Maps is not able to currently tell connectivity changes well, or that Apple Maps has a priority networking route or downloads things in advance.

2) Google Maps also has begun choosing unnecessary routes. I didn't use to need to double check and use my own head (as one should), but this is more frequent now as I don't trust it in this area. Yes, last night I was mid trip and saw Google Maps route but didn't have a place to pull over and tinker with it so I opened Apple Maps and just used its route which was quite different. The irony is that I had just finished jokingly making fun of someone for probably "being an Apple Music and Apple Maps user".

Make sure you disable this nonsense: https://www.fastcompany.com/90620494/google-maps-will-start-...

what in the facepalm

immediately disabled. that explains a lot.

The house number locations in the UK irks me. I submitted corrections for my neighbourhood for all house numbers. A year later, they all get moved back to roughly where they were.

It took me a while to figure out it's detecting the house numbers from Street View pictures and overriding my corrections.

Ours used to be correct but when I looked today the number and road had changed. I was going to try and correct it but it sounds like that would be a waste of time.

To be fair in our case it has been a mess for a long time, even the Post Office database had an incorrect entry for it.

Same here. Which is extremely weird because the house numbers can be CLEARLY seen in the street view!

Google maps sometimes gives strange routes, like routing onto a frontage road and then back onto the highway for seemingly no reason. I guess it's trying to avoid perceived traffic or something?

The only feature that has me staying is "search along route" and support for multiple hops. It's quite nice to ad-hoc add a stop for a coffee or restroom to my longer route, or to plan out a multiple stop drive.

Do any other maps apps for iOS have that implemented well now?

Apple Maps has this feature (adding a stop along a route). In iOS 14 it only lets you add one stop - they might have improved this for iOS 15.

Everything here is comparing Apple Maps and Google Maps, which is fair as the front-runners.

For those of us on Android though, does anyone have a good replacement app suggestion for Google Maps? Waze/OpenStreetMaps/etc? I've never tried them and would prefer not to trial them by fire, since I usually use them when I need to get somewhere for an appt or something :)

Yes, HERE WeGo. Benefit is being able to download a whole state or country to the phone which allows it to work completely offline. No need to preselect some bounding box to download or anything.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.here.app.m...

Thanks for the rec! How's the experience compared to the big names in terms of efficiency/UX/etc in your opinion?

HERE WeGo is built by HERE maps which creates maps for the navigation industry. They have been at it for over 30 years. So it's not some new company that is figuring out maps.

The UI is good, especially when navigating. Before I travel everywhere, I like to use the collections feature to keep track of all the places I want to go to.

Looks like they recently did a whole UI update. I need to look at that more (judging from the reviews, older users don't like the new changes, but that's true of any software, people don't like you moving their cheese).

(disclaimer: I used to work there).

A warning. I just downloaded this to try it out. To test I searched for directions to a location I travel to often. The directions didn't even get me out of my neighborhood before telling me to turn left onto a median divided road which doesn't have a gap in the median to allow turning left at that particular intersection. No other mapping app I have tried has ever made this mistake.

EDIT: For giggles I tried a few more mapping apps and websites for the same directions. No others made this same mistake but Bing Maps and MapQuest want me to drive on the jogging path around a pond which separates my neighborhood from the next and then use the streets in that neighborhood to get to the main road. I think both sites used base map data from TomTom.

For about 7 years Google Maps couldn't give me directions from my house to work. Not that they gave the wrong directions, no, literally couldn't give me any route.

Any mapping company has errors for individuals. Question is, in aggregate are they better or worse.

Do you have any thoughts why an app like here we go, isn't made available on f-droid. Or the apk isn't made available from their website? (Perhaps it's a bigger discussion than in a comment, but I'm sure there are a lot of users- especially on HN who are averse to the play store, and knowing the risks, are willing - even forced to use, other sources for their apks.)

for driving, nothing else comes close to waze.

Another map app I recommend is mapy.cz It uses many sources for maps. You can download them for off line travel too.

What annoys me is that if a business is running paid ads, you cannot click their organic location, you have to click on the square paid listing, costing them money-- even if you were explicitly looking for said organization and not entering through a non-branded term. Certain businesses (probably non-paying?) don't seem to show up as prominently, even when you zoom in on their building. They will have a claimed/populated profile, but for some reason, the interactive pin/location title will not show up even at the highest zoom level.

The web UI has some weird rendering bugs that were introduced with the last reskin. For example, at certain zoom levels highway ramps disappear so the highways look disconnected.

Edit: as an example, look at https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6264803,-79.321245,11.34z The highway labelled "427" on the left looks disconnected from the "Gardiner Expwy" until you zoom in further. I expect basic details like this to work.

I have noticed this trend among almost all the Google products I use.

YouTube getting rid of dislikes, adding in music mixes, and of course striking videos while providing less than adequate descriptions (if any) of the offending material.

Gmail mixes in ads with your emails more aggressively than ever before.

Google music has been replaced with YouTube music, an inferior, less usable version of the same product, but now it's tied in with your YouTube account so you get spammed with music recommendations that are frankly terrible.

Google Drive, actually scanning your files for unapproved materials.

Google Mini with a voice so eardrum-burstingly loud (and shrill) and no ability to control it separately like you can with Maps.

And of course their search itself has experienced a very noticeable drop in quality and seems now to be a Google Marketplace of Approved Agendas. Not just with the pop up "helpful" cards, but with the actual search itself. It's quite eye opening to do the same search on DDG and find useful results that weren't visible on the first 10 pages of Google.

This isn't even including the other products which I did like, but Google suddenly decided that I don't need anymore.

Google Docs still works well though.

I would agree, the UX is really clunky. Apple Maps used to be a complete joke but I tried it out a year or so ago after they did a big push to update it. For driving it is really good, for public transport or biking it is very city dependent. However, outside of North America I think Google maps is still superior.

The POI dataset is the one reason why I haven’t used Apple Maps. At least in the past, I’d get in my car and look up a store for directions and… the store wasn’t listed!

What I can say is that the Android app performance is horrible compared to what it was 5 years ago.

When I bought my OnePlus3 it was amazingly fast — basically instant, now it takes up to 20 seconds for it to become responsive. Clicking on a search result results in 5 seconds of camera panning, loading UI elements and the likes.

Busy area spots hide the map, weather wastes space, „what‘s going on“ wasting lots of bottom space, sights with huge 2D icons, ads, see nearby attractions, “search this area“...

Google Maps has become a user hostile mess.

I just opened Apple Maps for the first time and it‘s almost completely free of bullshit. Guess I will give it a chance.

It has felt to me over the last few years (and I have no inside knowledge) that Google Maps saw Apple Maps fail at launch, and didn't improve the service at all.

Meanwhile, Apple Maps and the OpenStreetMaps backing data has continued to get better and better each year.

Google is becoming more and more like Microsoft

For me I had to disable a newish setting called "Prefer Fuel-efficent routes". It's in navigation settings.

It too aggressively took me on a highway and I don't even think it was too effective in being fuel efficient.

It's always going to vary depending on your location. Google Maps still has far richer business listings, Apple Maps is getting there in capital cities but still nowhere near as close as Google.

I'm in Australia, a recent example I had was I typed in the supermarket chain "Woolworths" into Apple Maps search, started navigating, before realising it was navigating me to a petrol station that once upon a time had a Woolworths shop attached. Apple Maps literally did not differentiate between supermarkets and petrol station shops.

Being from an area where the roads are bad, I often share this sentiment. There have been many occasions where GMaps has rerouted me to a road that seems shorter but the quality of the road is pathetic. Feels like there should be a gyro sensor sending back information as to the quality of the road. Possibly it’s like a black swan type event that the maps designers have not thought of?

After ads started appearing on google maps coupled with my new iPhone I switched over to Apple Maps to give it a shot. For the sf bay area found Apple Maps has just as good navigation but is more pleasant to use. Now primarily using apple maps

I find it sometimes zooms in or out when it shouldn't. And I sometimes bump the AR button accidentally.

And reporting some types of map errors, such as incorrect lane guidance, and temporary street closures, never seems to be acted on.

Google Maps on my iPhone 12 is constantly being isolated from the network after locking and then unlocking. I have to kill the app to get it to work again and still that only works half the time.

I had to delete Google Maps from my phone. It was extremely bloated. Way too many unnecessary features caused the app to suck my battery dry and run very slowly. I switched to Apple Maps as well and have had 0 issues.

It's kind of a shame, just 4 years ago I used Google Maps every day to route through brutal traffic, and I thought it was the best thing ever. But those maps engineers gotta get promoted somehow, I guess.

I'm not sure about the quality. But the interface is bloated by default. I switched to HERE

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