The day I discovered that Apple Maps is Kind of Good now | Hacker News Reader

The day I discovered that Apple Maps is Kind of Good now

xkcd.com

361 pointslakis325 comments

Honestly I prefer Apple Maps over Google these days. This is mostly opinion and feel, but it "feels" like:

* Google is becoming less correct

- ex: "use the right 3 lanes" when only the right 2 lanes work

* Google is taking me on routes that are much less safe and more challenging

- ex: taking small side roads to a left turn onto a busy road with poor visibility and no light rather than right turns to the main road and signaled lefts

* Google is hammering me with unimportant details

- ex: I don't care that I'm on the fastest route

- ex: I don't care that something 4 hours away has a traffic jam

- ex: I don't need to be told to stay on just because an exit ramp has a disappearing lane

* Google tries to send me on wild boondoggles literally all the time. It sends me off highway in an attempt to avoid traffic, along with several other poor lost souls who are aimlessly listening to the same computer as me while we drive through some rural thru street.

So I stopped using google. Apple isn't perfect but it's unsurprising for long road trips and provides reliable instruction that follows major road paths.

I completely agree about the unimportant details. It frustratingly cuts up a long stretch of freeway into alerts to stay left or right at unimportant exits. This often encourages me to be on the wrong side of the highway especially if it’s telling me to stay left at a small road exit when a mile later I need to be in the right lanes for a freeway split. It’s definitely gotten worse this past year

The biggest anti-feature of google maps by far is the 'Change Car Icon' popup when you tap anywhere remotely close to your blue nav icon.

Oh, trying to tap to take an alternate route on the map? Want to tap to add a gas station stop to your route? Sorry, the touch target is too close to your nav icon, but hey at least you can cycle through 3 different car styles endlessly. What a waste of resources.

I’m sure their engagement metrics are amazing for that feature. “Hey, look, Bob used our new feature three times last night!”

I like the car changing feature. I changed mine to a cute toy-car-esque one.

You've obviously never driven with someone from an older generation.

My dad when driving on the highway and the road veers in any way that is in any way not a BLATANTLY obvious exit: "What do I do? Which way do I go?"

Me: "It's fine dad, just keep left. That's the way the main highway is heading"

My dad when Google Maps suggests a route that isn't the most direct way possible: "Why is it telling me to go this way? That's not the fastest route."

Me: "Dad, the app knows about traffic conditions. There's probably a good reason why it's suggesting this way"

My dad when he knows that 4 hours a way there is a bridge or a tunnel that has incremental conditions: "We should look up to see if the bridge is busy so that we can decide now whether in 2 hours we will pick a different route"

All these notifications are SUPER important for a certain type of driver - an older generation that has trouble with letting go of trust, and will insist on giving you directions to their house instead of just telling you the address.

And all these notifications can be silenced (If you click on the Microphone in the app while in Navigation mode, there are 3 options - 1/ fully silent, 2/ all notifications, 3/ only important notifications)

> You've obviously never driven with someone from an older generation.

Lol dude, your dad is not representative of an entire generation.

Man, I have some ancient folks in my family, verging on the 80s, and they are not technophobes. On the contrary, sometimes they annoy me with their over-trusting of google. My uncles trust google maps way more than they trust me.

~All our parents grew up without a handheld device giving them prompts every twenty seconds. You are being really arrogant by thinking an entire generation is less capable than anyone on here and “needs” that handholding more than “we” do.

Not to mention that most older folks can navigate in places they are semi-familiar without a need for a device at all. Most Gen Z drivers are basically incapable of conceptualizing a map of an area in their head and completely dependent on a device to tell them where to go.

People can change in all kinds of ways.

My mum used to be just fine with reading maps, but one of the early symptoms of her Alzheimer’s (before any of us recognised it as such) was that maps stopped making any sense to her.

My dad wrote some kind of software for the Plessy (subsequently Marconi) military IFF transponder projects, but after retirement it literally took him years to realise that the Google search results had a scroll bar and it wasn’t just three results.

(Unrelated, but are we millennials really going to bemoan gen-Z the way people bemoaned us when we were their ages?)

"are we millennials really going to bemoan gen-Z the way people bemoaned us when we were their ages?"

Yes absolutely. It is the circle of life.

I've worked as a 'professional' driver and I can tell you with certainty and a very large sample size that the only people who question Google Maps / Waze are Boomers.

Nobody under 50 ever so much as blinked an eye when I used voice recognition on my phone to start navigating to their address or the airport.

Boomers? "Google Maps doesn't know how to get to my house", "It makes you take X exit and that's ALWAYS slower" and so on and on.

They were always wrong. Google and Waze always knew where their house was, and showed a valid route to/from. Waze and Google Maps were always accurate to within a minute or two arrival-time-wise. Yet every time the Boomer in the back seat demanded a route change, they'd add 5-10 minutes to the trip time. I'd note the arrival time estimate, then note it going up with each turn the Boomer in the back seat made me take, and I'd note the final time, and it was always higher.

My dispatcher confirmed that drivers seemed to only complain about back-seat driving from boomers.

It was infuriating because I was not paid by time nor mileage, but trip, and sometimes I'd end up missing a shot at another trip I'd been lined up for.

Boomers were the only ones to insist on "helping" load or unload their luggage from the trunk...or supervising me / offering their opinion on how to best load. Or expressing doubt that I could not lift their luggage. And then express surprise when, shockingly, someone who spends all fucking day loading luggage in and out of the same car, is highly competent at it.

Boomers were the only ones to insist on "helping" the trunk lid auto-closer close. I'd push the button, start walking away, and the clown would stand there and press on the trunk lid (sometimes making the mechanism freak out, which would of course convince them that they were right, the mechanism needed their help.)

My 90+ year old father-in-law still drives and does shortcuts in both urban and suburban environments that none of the maps programs have caught. None of his driving was remotely 'dangerous' either.

Not everyone ages at the same rate or in the same way. If only I could be that active at 90. First, have to make it to 90.

Aye. If I have to age naturally, I’d prefer to be like my grandmother than either of my parents. She made it to her mid 90s, an extra 15 years of good health in both body and mind and got to meet her great-granddaughter.

My father in law always turned on the navigation system, to then systematically disregard every direction given by the system, because he always knew a better way.

Usually took us forever to get to our destination…

Apple’s voice prompts UX is better than Google. Apple tells you when to turn based on the traffic lights, rather than by distance, as well as guidance on which lane to stay in. The only problem is sometimes it misses lights or stop signs.

For example: turn right at the traffic lights after the next one vs “turn right in 500 meters.”

Google Maps has been showing traffic lights (and stop signs) on the route ahead for the last couple months – so I wonder if they will be shifting soon to a similar way of indicating upcoming turns.

This seems like the kind of thing that's great if the map data is extremely accurate, but far worse than the older style if there's any chance of mis-counting lights. Even hitting a glitch once (e.g. it says 2 lights when it's really 3) could hurt trust in the app's navigation a lot.

I’ve found lights data on Apple map to be fairly accurate. Rarely does it miss one or think a 4 way light is a 4 way stop sign intersection.

Apple Maps directions also has an "alerts only" mode which will shut up completely unless you need to know something urgent (e.g. you are approaching a 60 km/h speed trap and going faster than 60 km/h).

If you have the watch it will gently tap your wrist shortly before each turn, and it displays the turn in a very clear, uncluttered way on the watch screen, which you can clearly comprehend without needing to take your hand off the wheel. I find this is great in rental cars if you have no phone mount nor CarPlay and you want to avoid needing to interact with your phone while driving.

I love maps on the watch but it is incredibly annoying that you can't activate the screen (ie raise to wake) while keeping your hands on the wheel.

Interesting, I haven't noticed this issue, but I use my watch on the same hand that changes gear (at least when I'm in a country that drives on the right, which is most of the time), so I guess I'm used to having that hand off the wheel fairly often anyway.

(Edited to add: I just went for a drive and paid more attention to how I use the watch with Maps, and I don't take my hand off the wheel if I'm just looking at the directions. Rotating it towards me quickly is enough to get the screen to wake. I have the Series 6 where the screen only dims and hides dynamic information when 'sleeping'. Maybe older watches where the screen actually turns off & on have a higher threshold before they wake?)

> - ex: taking small side roads to a left turn onto a busy road with poor visibility and no light rather than right turns to the main road and signaled lefts

Encountered this on my last vacation.

> - ex: I don't need to be told to stay on just because an exit ramp has a disappearing lane

I've started to realize getting to some places is actually quite simple, but made to seem complicated by the constant Google instructions to "use the left 2 lanes to stay on [major road]", "use the right three lanes to stay on [major road]". Would help to relax if it was just "stay on [major road] for next 20 miles" instead of constant false indicators of a turn coming up.

Yes please. Or when I'm driving and there are roundabouts where I'm just going straight through. Just tell me my final turn, I k is how these roundabouts work.

> Would help to relax if it was just "stay on [major road] for next 20 miles" instead of constant false indicators of a turn coming up.

I hate this so much, and they all do it (I guess not Apple, interesting...). I live on the West coast, US, so road trips for me are often 100s of miles on I5. But instead of knowing that I have 337 miles left on this highway, I instead know that it's 3.2 miles until the next time I'll not be exiting the freeway.

And then, for all the chatiness… when you finally _do_ need to exit… half the time it tells me to exit in 15 miles then says nothing for 23 more exits until it says “take the exit” as I’m passing the gore and have missed my exit.

I’d rather it “stay on this road for 20 miles” then start giving me “exit in 1mi”, “exit in 1/4 mile”, “you’ve passed the last exit, next exit is yours!”.

My pet peeve is when I'm in an unfamiliar area but know my exit is coming in a mile or two it will keep reminding me to not be in the rightmost lane, then 1/4 mile or less from my exit it will suddenly tell me GET RIGHT AND EXIT NOW! In moderately heavy traffic, that's not always easy to do. There was no reason I couldn't have been in that lane earlier.

Yes!!! Why won't it just tell me what my exit is? I don't care if it's 100 miles away, just tell me what it is now so I can be sure I don't miss it. Messages like "continue for 10 miles" covey absolutely no useful information because I'm not going to count out ten miles.

> taking small side roads to a left turn onto a busy road with poor visibility and no light rather than right turns to the main road and signaled lefts

My current theory is that this is an artifact of the eco-friendly route option. I think it avoids lights if there's otherwise no significant difference in predicted arrival. It can be extremely frustrating because it seems to dump me making a left turn onto busy roads when there's a light one block down. I know I end up spending more time trying to make that turn.

I also find that the traffic data has become much less accurate. Once made me miss a flight because google insisted that this alternative route is much faster only to find out that it was actually much much worse, then rerouted to the original one only to add 40 minutes to the travel time.

If 40 min made you miss a flight, you left too late.

If you don’t miss a flight occasionally, you’re leaving too early ;)

And people wonder why I take the train.

At least it's much more of a pleasure here in Europe than some other places.

if you never ever miss a flight, you waste too much time at airports

Agreed on all points, but especially "Keep straight at the intersection.... Now keep straight." It makes me want to drive into a lamp post just to silence the voices^W^W unnecessary verbiage.

> ex: taking small side roads to a left turn onto a busy road with poor visibility and no light rather than right turns to the main road and signaled lefts

This is the biggest reason I try to avoid using Google Maps for navigation. It also tends to send me down narrow residential roads where I have to constantly be on the lookout for children, pedestrians, cyclists, or people backing out of their driveways. Or agricultural roads without a divider line where I need to slow down and pull to the shoulder a bit every time I pass oncoming traffic. And in the winter time these roads can be especially dangerous since they aren’t prioritized for snow removal.

Most of the time I’d much rather just take an extra 5 minutes to get where I am going if it results in a safer and more comfortable trip. The built-in GPS in my car does a much better job at this (although not without it’s own quirks) than both Google and Apple maps.

My wife thinks I’m crazy, but I do all my mapping by staring at the map for a couple minutes devising my own route in my head and memorizing it.

That's because Google Maps got massively worse over the years.

I'll add to your list of issues:

  * distracting me while I'm driving with a banner that blocks the bottom half of the screen, with a message written in small font, asking if a speed trap is still on the freeway. This is distracting and unexpected, leading me to take my eyes off the road to get a basic understanding of what the app needs, which starts with reading the text. Ironically, the font is small due to the inclusion of a "reminder" to only interact when it is safe.

  * screen space co-opted by ads, promotions and reviews for local businesses.

Google Maps and Gmail are products that rose to the top by being best in class. I can only assume that the smart people who built the original product, made many wise choices, and said "no" when it mattered are long gone. The new blood is not of the same caliber, and can only get promoted if they make changes. Unfortunately for them, the user experience was already excellent when they joined, and thus was difficult to improve upon. Seems like they resort to adding details that aren't relevant to the user, and trying to monetize things that are not core to the product. Every instance of feature creep and every dark pattern pulls the experience away from optimality, regressing on goals that were achieved 10 years ago.

Ads in an app which is being used for navigation while driving, are you serious? if so, then Google should be taken to court for reckless endangerment. In-app ads (tailored for attention grabbing and engagement) and safe driving are simply incompatible.

No sane pilot would ever accept ads popping up on the controls in an airplane cockpit, so let's keep them away from a car's dashboard, too. The fewer distractions the better.

I haven't seen ads popping up while navigating, but I have been getting what appear to be ads in the direction read-outs, e.g. "In 500 feet, turn right at the Wendy's."

Which is, honestly, one of the least-annoying types of ads I get on a regular basis. Sometimes it's much easier to follow than a street name anyway!

... at what point I end up saying sh*t, I didn't see a Wendy's there, was this the right road? and having to interact with the app _again_ to determine if what I just did was correct. :/

It does still show you the name of the street at the top directions card. This is part of the audio directions

Where I live this is the way we give directions (e.g. 2 blocks past McDonald's take a right), so to me it feels more natural than looking for a street name.

Next level will be detecting if you’re local to the area and using descriptions of landmarks that used to be there but aren’t present anymore.

  Turn left where the Tastee-Freeze used to be.

You missed it last time don't do that again :)

With apologies to Laurie Anderson:

  Hey Siri! How do I get to town from here?

  And she said:
  Well just take a right where they're going to build that new shopping mall
  Go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway
  Take a left at what's going to be the new sports center
  And keep going until you hit the place where
  They're thinking of building that drive-in bank
  You can't miss it.

  And I said: This must be the place

you never know, with GANs and transformer models, DALL-E type models, and stuff, Siri just might be able to come up with that in the near future

You know, the one where you tripped and chipped your tooth in the fourth grade…

> Sometimes it's much easier to follow than a street name anyway!

I think that is entirely the point. Apple Maps added something similar around a year ago, where it now says "After this light, ___" or "Take the next ____", which is much easier to understand than giving a street name that you have never heard of. It gets you to look at the road more than at the map which is a bonus for safety.

Just want to confirm that this is exactly why they mention it. It isn't ads so much as POIs (Points of Interest) are useful to use when navigating (sometimes more useful than streets).

I've been suspecting ads because it's very limited in what businesses it will call out. Like, less than 5% of the time, I'd estimate.

Maybe I’m being too charitable, but I suspect it’s down to a few requirements: instantly/universally recognizable to drivers, easily visible from the street, located on corners, and always pronounced correctly by the maps voice.

Fast food restaurants and other major chains fit that bill reliably enough that you could automate adding them to directions. Telling drivers to take a right at, say, a local restaurant that may not have an obvious sign could easily be worse than relying on street signs.

Landmarks are great, especially something like a Clock Tower, Water Tower, etc., but things like Starbucks, and others come and go out of business. MacDonalds is an exception in that they own their real estate and are unlikely to move. But many others can lose their lease and become something new.

I haven't seen ads in navigation mode.

Google, at least via Waze, egregiously displays banner and pop-up ads.

... when you are stopped in traffic or at a light. And IIRC, this was there before the Google acquisition?

Disc: Googler but nowhere close to the products discussed here.

It shouldn't be showing ads at all, ever while in a car regardless of whether the car is moving or not.

Maybe these ads are part of the reason every third stoplight I have to honk my horn because the guy ahead of me is dicking around on his phone after it turns green?

To maybe illustrate this a bit better, they are presented as location pins along the route, no banner or full screen ads. Pretty minimally distracting honestly

Waze used to show *full screen* ads when it detected that the car was standing still. Maybe they still do in some regions, they don't do it anymore where I live...

My biggest gripe is how I know when I need to stay on a road for say 20 miles. It used to say, “continue straight for 20 miles” but almost always now it

“Continue straight for 2 miles”

“Continue straight for 3 miles”

“Continue straight for 5 miles”

……

Then at some point I have to wonder ok when exactly is my exit coming up. And I have to zoom out on the navigation to see oh I still have a few miles to go. The progress it shows is always based on whatever fractional random segment length they’ve got me on at the moment. So I can’t quickly tell that I’m halfway into that 20 mile section

This often happens when differently-named or -numbered roads join end-on (i.e. one road becomes the other as you drive along it), and Apple Maps does it too sometimes.

Yeah I do get that. However, it used to not behave this way. So I can't help but think they broke something in recent years. I think they just wanted to increase the frequency of updates probably for "engagement" since tech companies generally go with quantity over quality on notifications. But this just breaks the functionality for me.

I forgot to mention sometimes "Continue straight for 1 mile" causes me to begin my migration from left lane to right lane in anticipation of the exit, then she just says, "Continue straight for 3 miles" and I'm livid. (Not sure if this is widely understandable but I tend to speed and usually am in the left lane passing/speeding, while exits are generally on the right so I interpret "Continue straight for 1 mile" as I have an exit coming up).

That impacts me with Apple Maps on occasion: if there’s some road name/id change that is effectively invisible as a driver because I’m still going straight, or more annoyingly when there are roundabouts in my path.

I often choose to use apple maps for nav. One annoyance is I will chose a preferred route out of the options it provides --that's good. Then, for no reason, Apple Maps decide mid-course somewhere that I must have actually wanted the other option I did not choose and it tries to re-route me. This happens from time to time, not too frequently, but enough to be annoying.

I feel like that's one big hurdle in tech in general. the best and brightest want to work on development of the best new shiny thing. but maintaining quality and "maintenance engineering" is the boring but important part in terms of reliability...but that's when the geniuses bolt and leave the company to do something else.

> * Google is taking me on routes that are much less safe and more challenging

But you'll shave 30 seconds off your trip ... unless you miss the light, then it was a mistake.

The main problem is that a bunch of these route decisions really only make any sense at all if you are a very aggressive driver.

> unless you miss the light

I've been running into this constantly. It seems like it has no allowance for the average number of seconds spent at a light, so it sends me routes cutting through town that end up being slower because of all the signals, when it could have just sent me up the freeway three more exits.

I've learned to be critical of the route and look before I leave.

I live in an area that has many traffic circles and Google Maps seems to actively avoid lights and prefer routes that use circles (which is completely fine with me and preferred after I got comfortable using circles). I think Google knows how much time people topically spend going through each intersection. But it may just be the eco-friendly option.

One think that really messed things up is that route option state is pretty hidden. My wife was ranting at how stupid Google Maps was because my daughter was using Apple Maps in the drivers seat and Apple Maps was doing sane things and Google Maps was doing dumb things. Apparently this had gone on for weeks. Turns out somehow she had "avoid highways" selected and didn't realize it.

The app really does seem to get worse and worse though. I think it's trying to push me to switch to using voice commands but I'm too dumb to remember the incantations yet.

I have felt for a while now that Google Maps does a lot of A/B testing on routes. Probably they inherited this from Waze -- I quit using Waze years ago because it routinely picked a route that I knew would be slower from my experience in the area. So I'd ignore the turn it wanted to make in that direction, and it would re-route on the better path... and the time estimate would drop a few minutes. So it -knew- the correct path was shorter but was sending me the longer way just because it wanted to be sure it was in fact the longer way?

Sometimes I wonder if Google engineers wrote this stuff to get users to test different routes.

Randomly screwing over people to make sure the algorithm isn't stuck in a local maximum seems on brand for Google, but I think it's because most of the data comes from Amazon delivery vans, taxis, Uber/Lyft and other professional (and hence, aggressive) drivers.

I also feel like Google Maps has become incredibly slow, lagging behind my real location by seconds and then “snapping” back to where I really every several seconds. It’s disorienting and Google Maps used to be the one that didn’t have that problem and all the others did - now that’s reversed in my experience.

I have been using Google maps for years to drive from my place to my parents place which takes roughly 7 hours traveling across the midwest of the US. It used to take a rather minimal number of different highways.

Recently though it decided to take me on an extremely annoying new route that has me going through a bunch of tiny seemingly abandoned towns with lots of backroads and even unpaved roads all to save less than 5 minutes.

Now I have to make absolute sure I select the proper route beforehand. But even when I do that it constantly nags me along the way that it has determined there is a faster route so I need to dismiss it. I can't trust it to not take me on some wild back road through a field.

It literally took me through a field when I was looking for my B&B at the end of a day of cycling the EuroVelo 15 route.

Not a road though a field, it wanted me to use a muddy ploughed footpath in the actual field itself.

I had a very similar experience in France! Do yourself a favour and get a dedicated bike GPS and plan the best route ahead of your trip. It's much more enjoyable this way!

I heartily recommend cycle.travel for the planning bit.

Proper pe-planning wasn’t really an option in my case, as I didn’t know how far I could get each day before I did it and therefore booked hotels and B&Bs about 3 hours before I reached them.

Your definition of annoying is not universal. I would happily pay a minimal number of extra minutes to get a more interesting route. Saving 5 minutes is a bonus.

Wild back road through a field? Yes please, every time.

That's what Waze is for. But sometimes the exciting route is an unprotected left turn against traffic that needs 10-20 minutes of waiting.

Google Maps fundamentally doesn't understand the difference between signposted speed, and practical speed, either.

I was on holiday in the UK a couple of years ago, down in south west, and it insisted on sending us down these really narrow, single-car-width country roads (with passing places). I grew up in the UK, and learned to drive on them, so no particular fuss with actually driving down them. The problem is they're "National Speed Limit" roads (60mph / 30mph in built up areas). They're just too narrow, and too twisty, to be able to come even close to it, let alone do it safely.

Unless there has been enough cars using Google Maps going down that road, within a recent enough time period so that it knows the road is currently slow, it'll send you down it assuming you're able to go at something approximating the limit. Sod the large road that's just a little bit further away and legitimately can be used at those speeds. It got almost farcical. I'd even attempt to persuade it otherwise, and part way through it would reroute and I'd still end up going down one.

I was at a cabin in California and thought I'd like to take another path out since the road in was all congested switchbacks and I just wanted a nicer drive, regardless of whether it took another 30 minutes.

google sent us on a fire road cut into the side of a cliff over a small stream. we really couldn't go more than 5 kph maximum and had to use a spotter several times to avoid going over the edge. when we encountered a car coming the other direction we all got out and tried to figure out how one of us was going to drive backwards until there was a turnout.

it took us 2 hours to to go about 5km.

Ironically, for motorcycle trips those are the types of roads that I prefer. I can have a route pre-planned, and the app will reroute to the 'faster' route automatically unless I dismiss it. I ended up reverting to paper and only use the phone for route planning.

> Google tries to send me on wild boondoggles literally all the time. It sends me off highway in an attempt to avoid traffic

That's odd, that's my biggest complaint with Apple Maps, and I feel Google rarely does it.

This feels a bit petty but a huge part of why I use Apple Maps over GMaps now is just the performance. GMaps is sluggish and can't reliably hit 60Hz even on brand new hardware.

We have space-age CPUs and GPUs in our pockets that are basically supercomputers! They are faster than most laptops! But somehow Apple Maps scrolls and zooms like butter but Google Maps drops frames all over the floor and makes the whole experience Powerpoint-like.

It feels like Google Maps has spent the last few years packing a kitchen sink's worth of features into itself (much of which seems of dubious utility) but at the same time completely lost the plot on really basic fundamentals like whether or not their renderer can maintain 60Hz on an iPhone 13 Pro, or whether their transit overlays continue to generate illegible lines.

On macOS with a gigabit connection, I consistently get map/tile issues in Apple maps that will just not load, even if I scroll or zoom. Huge swathes of gray. And then zooming in is entirely glitchy (and this is on a 2019 Mac Pro with a W5700X GPU).

Google maps is still the best way to find or discover things in a city. Find a place to eat, check railings, etc.

Otherwise I really do like Apple Maps.

> Google is taking me on routes that are much less safe and more challenging

While I don’t know that this is Waze’s fault, er, influence, I can’t help but be suspicious. I was on the Waze bandwagon years ago, but soon realized that Waze was increasingly becoming the algorithmic version of your Crazy Uncle Bob who always insists he “knows a shortcut” that involves going over three barely-maintained mountain roads and an unprotected left turn onto a six-lane highway.

My most recent one was Google Maps routing me off of interstates onto narrow rural roads to save a few minutes. At dusk. In the midwest.

Clearly no one working on that algorithm has experience driving rural roads at dusk and dodging deer!

Google Maps has a "feature" where it will suggest an alternate route if it finds one it thinks will save time. I've found the alternate routes don't usually save much, if any time, but they also tend to be more work driving - more turns, off the interstate, whatever.

The absolutely blood boiling part about it is that Google will tell me that it's going to take me on an alternate route, unless I press "No" or "Cancel" or something on the phone within a few minutes. How am I supposed to get my phone and press cancel while driving? I realize some people may have their phone / Google Maps integrated with the car, or may use their phone while driving, but I don't. For me the phone is basically announcing "Hey, I'm gonna annoy you in a few minutes, okay?"

Had this happen on a recent trip, and the worst part is that it changed it's mind and updated the route seconds before an exit - which we were already taking. Instead of reverting to the old route, it comes up with a 20km detour to get back to the (new) route. The best action is to simply stop navigation, and start a completely new route. Incredibly stressful.

It's just so shocking and so baffling to me that Google could actually release this feature without considering that maybe people won't be able to interact with their phone while you know they are driving. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt - but this design seems absolutely braindead to me.

It's TERRIBLE on motorcycle and honestly has probably killed some people. For context, on motorcycle I'll plan out a route beforehand, then I would have Google Maps play through earpiece in helmet, phone remains in pocket.

For some years I was using pebble smartwatch which would vibrate with the turn notification (and I could glance it quickly to verify if I wasn't wearing earpiece or couldn't hear it). In all of those described cases I can't interact with the phone. At some point Apple or Google decided to block the turn notifications from pinging over to my watch, so I had to exclusively wear earpiece to hear directions.

To tie in with the rest of the thread, Google Maps will automatically suggest whatever route it wants and since I cannot interact with the phone on this setup, it will just go with whatever it wants to do, which often leads me onto roads under construction and other potentially dangerous routes. No way to turn off this 'feature'.

Imagine how baffled and shocked you'll be when you realize they did in fact think about this and it's a feature. Every one of these stories of someone failing to prevent this rerouting is a nice little green bar on the PM's adoption chart.

This is an intended behavior to increase uptake of whatever project introduced alternate routes, and will be presented in the team's performance reviews as evidence of their success.

Do you know this to be true, or is this just conjecture?

Absolutely conjecture, but built upon years of working with ex-Googlers.

I wonder if Google engineers still use Google products.

Apple Maps has the same feature, but it's an opt-in change so I just ignore the announcement and it'll keep me on the previous route. Plus it's one of the things Siri works well for, just saying No will cancel it.

This feature is necessary when you're taking a long trip like SF-LA - it calculates the whole route because that's what the user expects, but of course there's no way the LA route made hours ahead of time is going to be the best one, since it doesn't know what traffic is going to be where.

> The absolutely blood boiling part about it is that Google will tell me that it's going to take me on an alternate route, unless I press "No" or "Cancel" or something on the phone within a few minutes. How am I supposed to get my phone and press cancel while driving?

Last summer this had my blood boiling. I was part of some backed up traffic but I could already see my destination on the other side of a river, Google Maps saying ~25 minutes away. Suddenly it asks if I want to take an alternate to save 2 minutes. I look at the map and it looks like a pretty wild path to try to save 2 minutes over so I say no. About a minute later it asks again. I say no. This keeps repeating, with a different estimate between 1-4 minutes. I keep saying no. Finally I don't manage to hit the no button quick enough and it assumes I want to save the 2 minutes... so now every exit it starts saying "take the exit...". It was at about this point I thought to just turn the car volume off until I got over the bridge and turn it back on for the rest of the directions.

There was just something about how annoying it managed to be that set me off about it, it couldn't have been less helpful and more of a pain if it tried. Now whenever I hear that prompt that memory comes up. That and like you say the damn "you're on the fastest route". No shit, you'd go off your rocker if I wasn't why bother telling me.

Recently I was going through Chicago and a similar thing started happening during a heavy traffic period but this time rather than "there is a faster route" it was "stay on blah blah for the next <x> miles". Again constantly repeating. I got to thinking about it and I came to the conclusion Google Maps must have an issue where if you stay relatively still and there is any location drift when it snaps you back onto the road it considers it the same as if you had just went through an intersection and it should update you on what's next or going on. In the case of going over the bridge in Cincinnati that meant telling me about the ever so slightly shorter path I could use. In the case of going through Chicago that meant don't take any of the coming splits. Or at least that's the best logical reasoning I could come up with, either way I just muted my car again.

As someone who primarily rides a motorcycle for transportation, and literally has no way to interact with my phone while riding, I agree with the sentiment that this is absolutely blood boiling.

I use Google Maps by listening to the directions through a bluetooth speaker in my helmet so I rarely am ever actually looking at the screen. I absolutely hate how many times it will interrupt/announce absolutely useless information, or at times suddenly announce a route change for a 30 second faster route and it'll just sit there waiting for my input which I cannot provide in order to cancel.

Scenic is a navigation app designed by/for motorcyclists; I use it occasionally in my Jeep to find less direct routes. Coming soon to Android.

You might find it less aggravating, dunno.

https://scenic.app/

Tank bag, my friend. I'd tried using voice directions, and honestly felt like throwing either my Shoei or phone off of a cliff. Granted, I mostly use navigation for longer trips, but my preferred solution is paper maps in the map compartment for highway driving. For in-town driving, I just keep a notepad in the tank bag and write down the directions. That few minutes also helps me to remember the route enough that I don't need to rely on it as much. I also find it makes riding more enjoyable, since I have one less distraction to worry about.

Plus, for longer trips paper maps are way better on a bike, since Google is really aggressive about what roads they hide. I've found way more fun roads to travel on after using this method. Plus, with a tank bag you always have your rain gear and other necessities with you. Only downside is they look ugly.

It does this with tolls too. I don't want to pay $8 to save 1 minute. I will maybe pay it to save 20 minutes. I've had it where I selected a non-toll route, something changed, then it threw me back onto the tolls.

Not that it excuses the feature, but do you have a reason not to get a phone mount? There's nothing wrong with interacting with a navigation app on your dashboard. Your phrasing of "use their phone while driving" makes me wonder...

I think there is something wrong with using your phone while your vehicle is moving. Taking your attention away from driving to mess with your phone is bad. I don't have a dashboard mount because I don't want my phone distracting me while I drive.

It's no different than adjusting the radio or climate controls. If you want to be stubborn and suffer, that's your choice, but don't pretend hitting "ok" on your phone mounted on the dash is some crazy dangerous thing.

Steering wheel buttons should be to go for all of these though not every car lets you use them with a paired phones map app unfortunately. You shouldn't have to look at anything or take your hand off the wheel to e.g. lower the temperature the same way as you don't have to in order to activate your wipers. 1 second of distraction on the highway is 100 feet less reaction time not just an example of someone being stubborn.

So you're telling me you never check your blind spots or look away from the road at a billboard or to look at scenery?

Checking blind spots isn't a distraction from safe driving it is part of safe driving, the same can't be said for these other things. If I want to appreciate scenery I just pull over and enjoy it. Particularly worthwhile places tend to have designated spots for this. As for billboards I can't really see why I'd want to be looking at advertisements in the first place, let alone looking at advertisements over looking where I'm driving.

Interacting with a touch screen that may try to distract you is pretty obviously different from touching the physical controls of the car. Plus, the phone is telling you "Interact with me now!" With the radio and climate controls you are free to change them at your convenience.

Finally, I didn't say it was "some crazy dangerous thing". You should mentally flag times when you are writing a reply and have to invent new, extreme, and non-representative language to characterize the position you are replying to. Likely, those will be times when, instead of actually replying, you are just babbling to no purpose. That said - taking your attention off of driving to interact with your phone is certainly sub-optimal from a safety point of view.

One of the biggest goals of a proper navigation app is to not be distracting. It shouldn't ever demand immediate interaction.

"you need to press a button in the next two minutes" isn't any more distracting than what you're already getting.

The only workaround I’ve found for this annoyance is to put my phone into airplane mode after selecting my navigation route. GPS and navigation still works after doing this.

This way it doesn’t update the route with a ‘timesaving’ route or to an expensive toll route. It’s crazy I have to do this and far from ideal as I would like it to update if there really is a major timesaving route, eg if an accident occurs, but I don’t trust Google Maps now to not update now with a screen only navigation alert.

What it should do is alert me to this change with an audible alert and wait for me to actively approve this route change.

I have a Ford and actually prefer the build-in SYNC maps. The SYNC maps will do interesting things like go into split screen at various times and visualize the lane I'm supposed to be in. It also will show the speed limit on roads I am driving even when I don't have a destination setup.

I had used Google Maps + Carplay for years, dismissing the built-in navigation, but during a long road trip recently I realized just how bright the 8inch screen in my truck is, even in dark mode. I switched to the built-in nav and it was significantly darker and I realized I could literally see more of the road with it than with Carplay because of the lack of added ambient light from the screen. After using it for a while I realized it's good enough and in some cases even better.

I'm going to suggest that a lot of this is your personal preference, and without more data (which presumably Google has) it's not fair to be so critical. Google does periodically ask "how did you like your trip?" so they're collecting the information.

I personally like the small side roads. I happily take alternative routes and saving time is just a bonus. Taking a wild guess, I would bet that majority of the population likes the alternative routing - either because they like the road less traveled or they're impatient and actually care about 3 minutes.

Majority can be good for helping decide defaults but it's a horrible metric to declare it must always behave like so. Particularly when the majority are in a minority of at least one of the choices, which I strongly suspect would be the case here.

Your feedback is all related to directions, but I have also found Google Maps to have an increasingly cluttered and unfriendly UI just for browsing and searching maps on mobile. Everything seems to be too many taps away and basic use cases like looking for the nearest restaurant are quite frustrating. Switching to Apple Maps was like the first day of spring.

Google as an overall company seems to have jumped the shark some years ago and the slow decline is starting to become apparent through many of their products, search included.

I strongly suspect that problem is that Google Maps (and various other Google products) were effectively "done"[0] a few years ago, but the team needs to justify it's existence somehow, so product managers and engineers are literally just changing things to have something to do.

[0] With the caveat that there's no doubt a massive backlog of missing backend data like bike lanes and public transport data that still needs to be filled in.

I use it a lot for cycling/walking/transit and I despise how difficult they make it to see what the road names are now. They make you zoom in really far just to see what is basic information for a map.

> Google is taking me on routes that are much less safe and more challenging

> - ex: taking small side roads to a left turn onto a busy road with poor visibility and no light rather than right turns to the main road and signaled lefts

This one irks me the most, so often it will take me a way where I need to get across a busy 4 lane road instead of taking me on a slightly different route where I will end up on that road instead, or at traffic lights where I can actually turn properly. I feel like it waaaayy over-optimizes for time "saved" to the point where it takes you a bone-headed way just to "save" you twenty seconds out of your whole trip, but _only_ if you are incredibly lucky with lights or breaks in traffic.

After reading this thread I am going to try out Apple Maps again and see whether it's any better.

My girlfriend and I have long switched between Apple Maps and Google Maps.

Google Maps' terrible UX has become a joke now. It mentions irrelevant details (e.g. emphasis on compass directions, which no modern person relies on) and uses esoteric language when plain English works (can't remember well, but things like "stay on right of the fork"). It just felt... badly designed, if not amateurish.

Apple Maps is far from perfect, but the cradle feels warmer.

>Google tries to send me on wild boondoggles literally all the time. It sends me off highway in an attempt to avoid traffic

Same happened to me several years ago, I stopped using Google maps. It tries to hyper optimise the journey-- in one case, there was some traffic on the highway so it took me thru the city. The problem was-- even with traffic the highway was still moving at 40mph. In the city, I was at 10mph and a red light every 5 minutes.

And at one point, it tried to save me literally 5 feet by taking me through a truck parking lane-- that is not only dangerous but probabbly illegal as well. I dumped google for Apple Maps, havent looked back since

Ok, so I guess Apple Maps is the new DDG. By this I mean, every DDG related thread immediately descends into anecdotes about "Google Search is terrible, DDG is much better" that always leaves me wondering "Are you using the same Google Search I am? Because it doesn't appear you are".

Google Maps' integration with, say, various forms of public transit APIs (in paritcular) is second to none. Like, it's not even close. It's true Apple Maps is a lot better than it was but most of those improvements, in my experience, have been very US-centric, meaning the gap is much, much wider in other countries. Google Maps listings are still way better.

What I suepect is that the same people who have decided they hate Google have now let that define their opinions on Apple vs Google Maps just like they have with DDG vs Google Search.

I can only recall two current complaints I have with Google Maps:

1. I've come across a listing that claims to be a supermarket chain. It's not. It's a local market. I've filed corrections about this. A year later it still shows the wrong supermarket chain. No idea why. You can see it on street view; and

2. Maps decided to hijack the Menu tab on restaurants to use an ML pipeline from someone who really wanted to get promoted by classifying photos tagged at that location into menu items instead of, you know, just showing me the menu PDF on the website.

Oh and while I'm airing complaints, there's a standard for showing exchange rates. Google "GBP to USD" and you'l get an answer of 1.23 (as of this writing). By the standard the entire finance industry uses this should be shown to 4 decimal places. It used to up until about 6 years ago. Someone changed it. It's clearly wrong. It's annoying. And if anyone from Google reads this, please fix this for God's sake.

Unrelated to Maps but you have to try.

I love Google maps but I don't think Google has any edge over other map services in transit API integration (partly because of what they did).

Pretty much every major transit agency publishes their schedule in two standard formats these days: GTFS for static scheduled and GTFS real-time for real-timr info. The G used to stand for Google before it was generally adapted and now it stands for general. All apps use the same data for showing transit feeds.

There are some exceptions, such as cities where the transit agency has an exclusive agreement with Google maps but that's becoming there.

There's a niche area where some apps focus solely on transit, adding a lot more data or integrating non standard custom APIs. Transit (which I love, sick UI) https://transitapp.com/ and CityMapper are two of them.

Huh?

Here in Toronto I find Apple Maps much more reliable for the TTC (public transit in Toronto) than Google Maps, and have for a couple years.

Google Maps is quite dumb on what routes to take me on, and oblivious to the existence of certain buses on routes where Apple Maps gives me pretty much my best route - first time, every time.

Guess your experience is different. I’m personally grateful there’s a better option.

In London, Google Maps is a joke for public transport. We use Citymapper.

Same goes for NYC.

I found out the other day that google maps recently removed the schedule explorer. It was a great tool if you were planning a trip on public transit that didn't have an obvious single leg.

If you were flexible with when to leave, you could scroll earlier/later and visualize time waiting/walking/bussing etc to find routes that optimise transfer delays.

I use transit.app now

And DDG uses Apple Maps and directions to serve its map queries.

No cycling directions in 99% of cities for Apple Maps either. Google's isn't perfect but it at least keeps you off highways and knows where cycle paths are.

> 2. Maps decided to hijack the Menu tab on restaurants to use an ML pipeline from someone who really wanted to get promoted by classifying photos tagged at that location into menu items instead of, you know, just showing me the menu PDF on the website.

I prefer this over the website, which is not always updated in many smaller restaurants. In contrast, with a physical menu, I can see exactly the same menu I'd get at the restaurant and thus be able to make a decision of whether the dish I want to get will actually be there or not.

> Ok, so I guess Apple Maps is the new DDG. By this I mean, every DDG related thread immediately descends into anecdotes about "Google Search is terrible, DDG is much better"

I've yet to see a thread on HN describing DDG as great search product compared to Google? Are you using the same DDG I was?

I prefer Apple Maps in absolutely every way except their business info. Many businesses are missing, listed but no longer operating, or have incorrect/outdated business hours and other metadata. I do my best to add or correct info via the in-app crowdsourcing interface, but it often takes a long time for the information to be reflected if at all.

That being said, it’s hard to compete with Google on data munging. Besides, if I’m actually looking for info on a business besides it’s location, I’d just Google it or visit its website anyways—especially post-pandemic as businesses close, open, and change hours so frequently.

I don't know any system that has good business hours.

I think this mostly because just about every business on the planet has changed their hours - multiple times - during the pandemic.

Agreed. But with google maps I can suggests changes and add info and it will be accepted, I can't to do that with Apple Maps. Maybe that's part of why Google Maps has better info.

(Or maybe I just haven't been able to figure it out how to contribute to Apple Maps, I even googled how to do it and got to a place where business owners could enter details about their own business)

I know someone who worked at Google Maps in this area, and believe it or not the business directory problem is probably harder to solve than the rest of the app put together. You can fine tune map parsing and routes and algorithms all you like till they are good enough for every reasonable use case, but there's really no technical solution for a small restaurant that has no online presence and simply opens and closes when it feels like it. Google crunches data from a hundred different sources – looking up local directories, cold calling every restaurant in the world, mailing them postcards, measuring visitor foot traffic, analyzing data from street view, looking at community edits – and draws a somewhat reasonable picture. It's borderline impossible for anyone else to do this.

Another feature Google Maps excels at is estimation. If the app tells me I'll get to my destination at 3:24 when I start the route, I will really get there there at 3:24 no matter what. I don't know how they do it, but no one else is even close to that accurate.

There were several interesting businesses that shut down early 2020 that had an interesting approach to getting high quality business data: send actual people/dedicated staff to a neighborhood and document all the businesses!

Turns out, subject to actually having a working business overall, this gets you way higher quality location data.

They could lobby for laws that require business owners to publish their data, but I suppose then they would lose their advantage.

Re: estimation - I'm convinced it even factors in that I speed a bit beyond the posted limit! No longer can I get the satisfaction of arriving earlier than the ETA.

It definitely does that, otherwise every estimation on California highways (where driving 20 mph over the speed limit is the norm) would be inaccurate.

Not too long ago, something weird happened to Google Maps in Norway: A lot of places were just names of ordinary people like "Ole Olsen" and "Anette Andersen", scattered around in residential areas with no store front.

The simple explanation — not confirmed, but it's easy enough to deduce from the evidence — is that someone at Google imported a business directory of Norwegian businesses that also included sole proprietorships (enkeltpersonforetak).

Here [1] is a screenshot of a random area of Oslo I zoomed into.

In Norway, it's very common to establish a sole proprietorship if you are self-employed (which includes professionals like artists and authors) or have some kind of business income on the side. About 3.7% of Norway's population has a sole proprietorship.

The problem, of course, is that pretty much all of these are just people's own homes, not stores or office spaces accessible to the public. So it's nonsensical to put them all on the map. Somebody screwed up.

I've reported the issue, but of course they never replied, and the issue still exists. Now and then I'll report a business as erroneous, but there are around 216,000 of them.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/pI42FoP.jpg

It isn't just Norway, it's in the US, too. There are a shitload of obvious consultancy/sole proprietor/LLC type businesses in a lot of rural areas on Google Maps.

That's a pretty common issue - at least one maps app in Australia has shown businesses at their owner's houses, and has shown people's retirement accounts as businesses on the maps.

> Another feature Google Maps excels at is estimation. If the app tells me I'll get to my destination at 3:24 when I start the route, I will really get there there at 3:24 no matter what. I don't know how they do it, but no one else is even close to that accurate.

I remember reading this a few years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20180221091712/https://arturrr.c.... Their conclusion is that Apple Maps gave the most accurate estimations.

For me it's almost always 10 minutes later than the estimation (Europe). I just add 10.

I think that's one of the great things they got when they bought Waze. Pre-pandemic, I had to do a cross-town trip right near the peak of rush hour once a week. I would use Google to get a sane route but their time estimates never seemed to account for increasing traffic volumes and it would take 5-10 minutes longer than estimated at the start of the trip.

Waze would send me down residential streets to save 10 seconds, assuming I was able to make a left turn without a light at the next major road. But they always nailed the arrival time. I would go with whichever app suited my mood.

I run into this occasionally so when knowing business hours is really important for some reason I usually call to double check. I like that the phone number is right there, and the link to open yelp.

Re: corrections, I’ve only done it once, but when I discovered Apple had a coffee shop on the map that didn’t exist I submitted a correction, and to my surprise I got a thank you reply and saw the map corrected in under 24 hours. I thought that was pretty good.

Business info in Apple Maps is wrong even in SF and NYC. It's really bad.

As a business owner, Apple doesnt make it easy to update hours. There’s a whole approval process, so even if I wanted to update them if we decide to change day of it won’t be reflected in the App

As an app developer, I’m not aware of any API either. Google has a My Business API where I can integrate to update my business info/hours

Business info on Google has gotten so bad (at least where I live) that it's also all but useless, meaning the last reason I had to ever even open Google Maps is gone.

I've been using Apple Maps every day for a couple years now and it's been a breath of fresh air. Type in address, get directions. Like mapping is supposed to do, and like Google used to do before Google as a whole decided they know what the users want better than the users do, and went the HP-way of bloat-over-function.

Apple Maps is good for directions now … Google Maps is still much better as a kind of digital Yellow Pages … to figure out where you want to go to begin with, what’s open, get reviews of stores and vendors, as an entry point to food delivery… you know, all of the monetizable parts of a maps app.

Yeah, Apple Maps is still not as good for finding points of interest. A huge missing feature is that there's no equivalent to Google Maps' "Search this location" button. So if you search for something and then move the map, you just have to randomly pinch and scroll a bit and hope that it'll refresh with the new search radius.

They will never do it willingly, but I wish Google would split the POI stuff out of their maps app. It's all getting incredibly bloated the way it is, anyway. Then I could look up a place in there - because it's an excellent service - but use Apple Maps for the rest.

I wish the same. In general when I need to call a local business (plumber, electrician, pizza delivery, etc.) the easiest way I know how is to look them up on google maps, then hit "call". It seems... silly... to basically have to look up directions to a place on a map I have no intention of going, simply because it's the closest thing I have to an online mobile-accessible local phone book.

That is a bit silly, but on the other hand, sometimes it’s important to check that you’re calling the right branch, or that you aren’t confusing a business with a similarly-named one in another city, and a map view is good for that.

Google Maps will even tell you if something is in stock. I searched Sunkist Zero Sugar on Google Maps and it showed me all the grocery stores in my area that carried it and “in stock (updated today)”.

That's impressive. Thanks for the heads up. I never would have tried searching for a specific product that way. I have searched for "burger" or "pizza" successfully, but a specific product along with an inventory check? Wow.

That's because Apple Maps uses Yelp as its POI database, and Yelp isn't impartial, business owners can pay to be higher up in the search results, and to remove negative reviews.

Changing their POI source to something else would be the single biggest improvement Apple could make to Maps.

Not to mention Yelp isn't a "thing" outside of boutique restaurants and coffee shops in busy metro areas, while Google Reviews are for the other 95% of businesses and locations.

Is yelp still a thing in those areas anymore? It's mobile website is nonexistent and I can't be the only one that never cared to download the app.

Yelp is still pretty good for major U.S. metropolitan areas. Not sure what's beyond that, other than Tripadvisor is like Yelp for the rest of the world.

Well, that's reason enough for me to prefer Google Maps.

No kidding. Yelp is an abysmal dark-pattern-laden product, and I avoid it at all costs. Why would anybody partner with them. It’s like partnering with GoDaddy.

I’ve noticed that in the last few months, Apple Maps has been showing their own ratings, and sometimes even prompting me for a thumbs up/down rating, for certain businesses. I haven’t read anything about them starting their own POI database to eventually replace Yelp, but that makes me suspicious — and it would certainly fit Apple’s modus operandi of owning their own data/infrastructure as much as possible.

I used Apple Maps for directions for the first time since it launched the other day, thinking it would be a piece of crap, and was very pleasantly surprised. The results were the same as Google, but presented in a better UI.

Apple Maps has been good for a while now (3 years?) at least on core functionality (navigation, street names). I would say in terms of navigation, Apple Maps is superior to Google Maps. Apple Maps is more accurate about which lane to be in, shows the stoplights to pass before crucial turns, and labels the streets to skip over before turning near your destination.

They don't have the same content features of Google Maps yet. You may have noticed Apple integrates with Yelp to provide you with feedback on restaurants and points of interest, but in my opinion Yelp is unreliable. Also since Google cares less about marketing a pro-privacy stance, Google shows you how busy locations are, which can be useful.

On a more neutral note, it would be nice if either Map app re-routed common commute routes based on traffic incidents. Anyone who commutes down a contraflow lane knows that an accident in that lane makes it worse than the main route.

It’s so much easier to navigate with Apple Maps (when it works). Hearing “turn right at the stop sign” or “go past these lights” is so much more helpful than “after 800m, turn right”

I haven't really tried apple maps since it came out and was bad. However, one thing I dislike about Google maps nav is how formal it is, even in areas that I have driven around for years.

Often, I will drive to a hike where I need detailed navigation as I get outside my comfort zone, but I am completely familiar with the highways near me. It would be so much clearer if it just said "take I-270 south in half a mile" instead of, "Using exit 272, use the second from the right lane to take I-270 south, I-270 North, then stay left at the fork to take I-270 south." I know how to get on I-270 south, all you need to do is tell me that is where I am going, not the minutia on how to do it.

I can see how the latter is useful for someone passing through, but google maps knows I've been through that intersection hundreds of times. It's really distracting and counterproductive for me. I wish there was some "give short instructions in my area" type setting that would simplify instructions in this case.

Google generally has a goldmine of personal data that it could use to improve your user experience and make driving better, same with Search and YouTube. The past decade has shown Google is content with only using your personal information for serving you ads, not improving other functions. I wish what you suggested could exist too.

Probably because people scream bloody murder when they use personal information for anything other than the most critical, documented business functions (i.e., serving ads.)

A version that I've long wanted, which is close to what you want: a "less verbose" setting for the voice instructions that would give you abbreviated instructions or perhaps even just a tone. Very often, all I need from Maps is an audio notification to let me know a turn is approaching so I don't miss it and I can look at the map for the details. Having the details read out in excruciating detail is much more annoying, as you point out.

I have mine set to meters as well, but for some instructions it will randomly say "after 1000 feet, turn right". I also agree that Apple Maps's relative instruction giving to be a much better design, it's almost as if they know that they build things to be useful for humans and not robots.

I found I really appreciated Apple Maps' relative directions also take into account differences in context of walking rather than driving. I've used Apple Maps for walking directions between bars and between the relative directions and Apple Watch integration it felt like magic even (especially?) while intoxicated.

I disagree. If the distance is accurate (I've had a few trips where Google Maps seemed to be 10s ahead of my car location) then I don't need to worry about looking at lights or stop signs and deciding if these are the ones they are talking about or the one in half a block. I can easily tell that the next turn is more than 50m and this is the one I need.

I came here to say this. When there is a series of lights coming up, I don't know which light is X metres away.

I've been using Apple Maps routinely for navigation in the UK for at least a year now, and I have to agree, it's quite amazing these days to the point where I prefer it to driving with Google Maps

I did have some trouble with it while driving in Norway, but even Google Maps had issues there where it couldn't recognize which road I'm on, and the ferries were a bit confusing

This happens with both though. I've had Google try to send me the wrong way down a one-way street, as well as take me round the houses because it thought a two-way street was one-way. We'd need some kind of large study to say which was worse in that respect.

Apple Maps becoming good is a testament to Apple’s engineering culture and relentlessness. They made the decision, 9 years ago, to provide an alternative to Google Maps. They kept iterating on the product despite being inferior during the earlier days. Most other big tech co’s printing the amount of cash that Apple has would have abandoned the maps product and paid the Google tax.

I wish there was an actually good openstreetmap client with some kind of usable review integration. Nothing beats google maps reviews. Also all companies are usually most-up-to date in google maps. But the openstreetmap data, for me it's way ahead of anyone.

Apple Maps is an openstreetmap client. They use and contribute lots of data too. They use other data also. and it's hard to know exactly what you are seeing comes from what source.

Apple being so secret means they dont really do open data that well.

Very much agree, especially now that Google Maps seems to be monetizing their location listings more (showing sponsored results instead of relevant results in map views, etc).

For OpenStreetMap data I am using the https://organicmaps.app/

"Organic Maps is pure and organic, made with love: Respects your privacy ; Saves your battery ; No unexpected mobile data charges"

And OpenSource: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps

But the "usable review integration" is not a solved problem yet.

Apple Maps is still utterly useless in Russia. There are no buildings. There are no public transit routes. Points of interest are all messed up. I've never dared to try to get directions from it, but I'd assume that not only would it not pick the optimal route, it would probably suggest you drive wrong way on a one-way street or something like that.

That's really interesting. I was there for the world cup a few years ago and Apple Maps coverage of the cities with games was quite good, even away from the stadia. I actually only attended one game as it was an easy way to get a visa at the time, but did poke around some of the other cites.

Oh, interesting. I just opened Maps.app on macOS after reading your comment, and the building shapes are finally there, at least in St Petersburg downtown?! The restaurants are mostly correct, too. Something must have changed recently. It wasn't this good even just a month or two ago.

Still no public transit, and still Apple-only (I use a Mac but an Android phone), so still useless for me personally, but it's nice to see it improve.

Though several years ago it was definitely just streets, parks, and rivers.

In New Zealand, Apple Maps is the worst kind of useless, especially when paired with Siri. The Dumb and Dumber of the tech world.

If I ask directions for a cafe within a 5km radius, either of these scenarios will occur: 1. Siri won't understand. Eg: Shelly Bay Bakery -> Directions to Shelly Bay. 2. Siri will understand and direct me to a cafe approximately 10,000 kms away, and then refuse to find me a suitable route.

Google Maps just works.

The "street view" implementation in Apple Maps is amazing. I really recommend you try it if you have an iPhone, the 3D sensation is far superior to Google Maps street view which feels very flat after using Apple Maps.

Some of Apple's street views in areas they've focused on are particularly incredible. Their maps of San Francisco are insanely detailed, for example, down to the level of showing individual trees, buildings, and street markings.

Having lived in the same house for 10 years and done a bunch of work on it, what I find fascinating is the age of the photos they stitch together. I can look at the arial view and it's from when I had the swimming pool, switch to 3D and see it's once I built the chicken coop, rotate to look east and "Oh look, that's after we put on the solar panels".

I wonder what drives the frequency of when the maps images are updated.

I have been burned too many times by Apple Maps because I don’t always travel in cities.

The mental overhead of having to double check with google maps means I can’t imagine using Apple Maps again until Google Maps screws me over.

Yeah, I've had too many total botches with Apple Maps that I don't trust it on new routes. I always check the route with Google, and then maybe use Apple Maps for navigation while driving. I also fall back to Google because I can cache maps ahead of a trip while Apple will just fail when offline. And Google is way better for pedestrian trips, live transit information, and business info.

Basically the only niche Apple has earned with me is in my car, using CarPlay.

I’ve used nothing but Apple maps for the last 3-4 years. Previously I heavily used Gmaps, OpenStreetMap and Waze. The issue with the commercial maps was that they undoubtedly would sell my data or do other horrible shit with it. OSM was janky, so I only use that when I walk around. That left me with Apple maps, which has had a bad rep for a while. I tried it and realised that the interface looks great, the actual maps are good now, I can share my ETA with people, and most of all it’s native to the phone! Another great benefit is that Apple won’t necessarily sell my tracking data. Or if they choose to, it’s nothing more than they would already have from me using the phone anyway.

Isn't apple maps based on open street map?

Apple Maps only uses OpenStreetMap in some places I believe - if anyone knows exactly where I'm very interested to hear!

I’ll be clearer: The app front-end for OSM was jank (on iOS in 2018). Apple maps does have a marker to show that “OSM and other providers” have contributed to the data. There is also a logo for ‘tomtom’.

I’d love a map feature that paused directions until the last ~10% of the trip. I know how to get on my local highway and drive for 60 miles! Let me queue up the address but only start talking to me when I need directions.

Google Maps has actually led me wrong far more than Apple Maps, obv. anecdotal. I feel like Google Maps has way too much ML applied to it, and now that is coming back to bite it hard. The last time I used google maps was on a forest road, following directions to a remote-ish campsite. It literally had mistaken a light path through the trees as a road, and then had us try to turn into the bushes. Looking at the map of the area is was clear the road finding algorithm has mistaken a lot of small paths and tracks of light colored trees (!!!) as valid roads.

Google Maps also has an unfortunate tendency to go route-flapping, telling me that first one route, then another, is better. Often these routes diverge quite some distance away, and the "best" route switches back and forth a lot. I am also assumed to opt in to each route change unless I click "No thanks" — even if I was previously offered the route and chose another one. I am not going to click No Thanks, because I'm riding a motorcycle, thanks; therefore I use Apple Maps.

That auto-opt in for alternate route is the worst feature ever.

I've had cases where I was on a highway far away from any exits and there was a jam caused by an accident, and google maps started flip flopping between 2 different "optimal" routes that required me to first take one exit that's ahead of me, and then another exit that was far behind me. Presumably google was seeing the traffic jam and determined that my current route is no longer optimal, and wanted me to do a U Turn on a highway where there are no exits.

Apple Maps will suggest alternate routes with an automatic opt-in if you don't respond, but, in my experience, it's much more conservative about making those suggestions.

I absolutely despise that auto route change feature. Whether (but especially) on a motorcycle or in a car. It’s dangerous and it fills me with rage.

Also, that software is so non-configurable these days: Is an “Automatically accept better routes” checkbox that esoteric?! I’d say I want to find the product developer responsible but it seems like it’s most of them these days. It’s like not being able to turn off auto-playing previews in streaming apps.

Sorry, rant over.

And some people trust it without a second thought. This past New Years there was a huge snow storm in the Tahoe area, many roads were closed, and clueless Bay Area people were following google maps directions around the closures into unmaintained mountain roads in a huge blizzard.

even in the days of paper maps people would drive to tahoe utterly unprepared. Much as I dislike Google I don't think they can be blamed for clueless Bay Area people.

Apple Maps does some insane stuff. For example, it overlays landscaping - trees / plants - in front of the route I’m trying to drive. I do not need cute digital obstacles in the way of my map. Just tell me how to get there!

Split household. Apple Maps in Carplay is garbage in the default layout, zoom level, and way it organizes the screen while driving compared to AndroidAuto + Maps.

When searching for information about when something is open, etc, Maps is leagues better.

Like others have mentioned, I like the lighter 'tone' of Apple Maps directions compared to google.

1) Google maps, 2) Waze, 3) Apple Maps.

I wonder if that depends heavily on the particular CarPlay display and implementation. My car has a fairly large portrait display and Apple Maps is vastly more readable at a glance (and IMO aesthetically pleasing) than Google Maps via CarPlay. Also, Apple Maps is able to put the next turn information on my instrument cluster, which is perhaps a CarPlay API that Apple doesn't give third-party CarPlay navigation apps.

Quite possible. We use both in our 2021 Forrester, and Carplay gives very little space in the view to the maps. Google use to keep maps very 'simple', but Apple does the simple much better (aesthetically).

The moment you need to dig in, Apple maps fails me. Finding Locations (via voice while driving or otherwise), hours of operation, or traffic theres no comparison.

Also, walking mode and public transportation is great on Google Maps. Had some trouble in Chicago with wife's apple maps doing either on multiple occasions.

One thing to note though -- IPhones have great gps stability. My wife's iphone often does a better job with gps and that can kill the whole app experience before you get started especially in a new location or a dense urban area with tall buildings etc.

I have a 2020 Outback with the tall 11.6 inch screen. I'm not familiar with the options on other models or model years. I totally agree with everything else you said, except that Apple's traffic info seems reliable (granted, I'm in the Bay Area). I only use Apple Maps for in-car navigation and for storing my own lists.

My wife wanted the outback for that screen alone. A screen that large would probably make me feel less annoyed by the cramped maps in the dashboard mode.

Oh, I totally agree that Apple's traffic is solid. Google Maps seems more responsive to traffic. I will see Speed traps, bad traffic, etc come and go quicker on gMaps than Apple -- completely non scientific observations. YMMV

That's interesting because in my car (a Honda) it is Android Auto which puts navigation info on the instrument cluster while CarPlay does not, with either Apple or Google maps.

Google maps removed a feature I used a lot in the past, the schedule explorer. I tried to use it the other day only to find it had been removed recently, so use other apps now.

https://twitter.com/vaughndavis/status/692914119192743936

https://support.google.com/maps/thread/156908963/schedule-ex...

Isn't Apple Maps basically TomTom?

Also I find that where I live (Germany) OpenStreetMaps is superiour to both Apple and Google.

Not anymore. At launch the road networks was from TomTom, but for years now they have been in the process of completely redoing it from scratch themselves. From a quick Google search it looks the new data rolled out to Germany a couple of months ago.

Apple relies on a massive number of data sources for maps: https://gspe21-ssl.ls.apple.com/html/attribution-221.html

I've been using apple maps for probably 3 years now and for driving it's great. Both for local navigation and driving from the east coast to ~michigan/illinois. My family still swears by Waze, though.

The only thing I hate is it uses yelp for the reviews of places. Want to read more reviews or view pictures of a new place? Too bad, you need to install the yelp app... So I'll use google to look up places and then put the address into apple maps.

I used Apple Maps Navigation a few minutes ago because I was to lazy to enter the destination in the car navigation system. And so I got really annoyed of Apple since all directions were 200m to late. I really like the feature where the phone remembers the position of the parked car.

It would be nice if I could send the destination from phone to car in a simple way (no route, just the destination), but this might only work with really new cars.

Gmaps remembers where you parked your car too.

Apple maps also does this

isn't that what the comment i'm replying to just said?

oop--yep! sorry. I must not have read either comment carefully

Tesla allows you to send an address from the Maps app to your car (via the share menu). It’s one of my favorite features. I have no idea why other manufacturers wouldn’t replicate that experience.

It took some time for me to adjust - Apple Maps shows your position exactly where you are, Google Maps shows your position in a few seconds in the future, which gives you more time to react. Once you realize the difference, it's much easier to use Apple Maps.

I've been using Apple Maps for the last couple of years, and they've served me just fine.

I'm told that it is quite dependent upon where you live, though. A friend of mine, from Minnesota, says they aren't so good, over there.

As far as software goes, I use Apple Maps, because I don't feel like paying licensing fees, or including fat dependencies.

I have never received any complaints about the accuracy of the maps in my apps.

I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with google maps recently because its time estimates are just way, way off.

My guess is that this has something to do with their ML assuming I will exceed the speed limit by X MPH based on my driving history or the flow of traffic or something, but it’s insane to go 80 on a 65 MPH highway and somehow arrive several minutes later than the original estimate.

I've had this issue too, but only sometimes. Thinking about it, might be due to stoplights. Google has no way of knowing when I hit a red light, and some of them are obnoxiously long. I'm assuming Google uses an average, so if you get unlucky it get be way off.

Yeah I dunno, I mostly mean highway driving. Like I’ll go ~20 over the speed limit (basically the flow of traffic in jersey haha), for an hour and still get there the same time as my original ETA.

I stopped using google maps because I got sick of them trying to force me to log in so they can legally share my location across products (I know this is why they do it because I was there at TGIF when Eric said so).

Using dark patterns to do a legally questionable thing to defeat quite reasonable privacy protections is not how you delight this user.

I have been using Google Maps, Apple Maps & Here interchangeably.

Apple Maps is better than Google Maps in metros, while the reverse is true beyond suburbs & in freeways. Google Maps seems to work better in South & SE Asia. In supported regions however, HERE maps is better than both of them. It is a shame that app lost traction.

HERE's web map has the strangest approach to not supporting Japan where it shows the country as if nothing but its major highways and some rivers exist. It'd be better to show a "sorry, this is all wrong" sign.

It is great in many other countries though.

I no longer use Google Maps because of privacy concerns, over the years Apple Maps got much better but unfortunately turn-by-turn navigation is still sub-par.

For example it will take you out of the main road and into a narrow secondary road, just to save 1 minute in travel time (which often is not even the case because on narrow secondary roads you will have to slow down quite a bit).

Other times, it will direct you to stay on a certain lane and then ask you to take an exit, but now it's impossible to take that exit since there is a guard rail between the lane you're on and the exit[1].

[1] this happens all the time in Sydney, just North of the Harbour Bridge, when going towards Cammeray or Crows Nest. It will tell you to keep right. Then it will ask you to take the Falcon Street exit on the left - but now there is a guard rail between your car and the exit, because you kept right.

Apple Maps is so good now there is no reason to use Google Maps unless you’re on Android

The best thing about Apple Maps is the “at the next stop sign, turn right”. That is a wonderful way to navigate!

“Go through this light then turn left at the next one.”

Those are the types of instructions that got me using Apple Maps.

My muscle memory has been so conditioned by Google Maps (on a computer rather than a phone) that the main reason I don't use Apple Maps is the zoom in / out actions on trackpads are reversed and the drag action is different. I think most other maps systems like OpenStreetMap and Mapbox use the Google-style actions too. I just cannot get used to the Apple ones and it frustrates me as I'd like to use Apple Maps over Google Maps as I'm more convinced about Apple's privacy stance, and don't mind Apple Maps having access to my contacts, making it easier to say "direction to X's house" rather than having to type in an address or postcode.

The scroll direction is only reversed between windows/mac, both Google and Apple Maps work the same, on the same OS.

I misremembered - two finger dragging drags the map, unlike Google Maps which zooms. You need to press shift on Apple Maps to zoom, but you're right that it's the same direction.

Actually, just because someone on the internet is wrong (me)... The "natural" scroll direction on the Magic Mouse means that the zoom does work in the opposite way to Google Maps. That's what I was thinking of.

What's apple maps? Google Maps is a Website.

Apple Maps are available on iOS, iPadOS and macOS. But also on the web, for example at DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=paris&hps=1&ia=web&iaxm=maps

Still a big fan of Waze because you can report hidden police and speed traps.

Apple Maps has this as well. You can report police, hazards, and accidents.

How exactly are people supposed to do this while driving?

"Hey Siri, report a hazard on the road"

"Hey Siri, report a speed trap"

It's the passenger's job. That, and keeping an eye out for deer.

At least my car with car play it’s two buttons on the big display.

I would still suggest, anecdotally, that Google Maps is a bit more up to date and comprehensive over Apple Maps. However, that has narrowed a LOT over the last few years, to the point where I really don't worry about it much. I prefer Apple Maps' interface, smoothness, etc. over Google Maps. GMaps is still a good app and a great mapping/directions tool but being in the Apple ecosystem, Apple Maps works about as well (or close enough that it doesn't matter much, at least to me).

I use Apple Maps for navigation and it is mostly good. The only gripe I have is that they don’t seem to handle the predictive approach to a turn as well as Google does. What I mean by that is that the image of where my vehicle is in relation to a turn appears as if I have more road to drive before I’ve reached the turn, whereas I feel Google does a better job of factoring in vehicle speed into where it places the vehicle on the map in relation to the turn. On Apple it feels like it is “late”.

I see all these people popping corks to Apple Maps, but all I read is

> anglosphere

If you would step out of your bubble, you would realize how terrible Apple Maps is aside from a few blessed regions.

> If you would step out of your bubble, you would realize how terrible Apple Maps is aside from a few blessed regions.

Okay, but I'm trying to get around inside this blessed region, so you'll forgive me being happy that there's an option that works here without being Google.

what map applications work best in your non-anglophone region of interest?

In Czechia, for example, there's a fairly successful (in some ways even superior) Google Maps competitor in Mapy.cz. Google Maps are better in Prague and other larger cities. Mapy.cz focused on providing features Google didn't really care about, like mapping hiking and cycling trails or having nearly every backcountry road covered in their Street View alternative.

https://mapy.cz

If you check the attribution, mapy.cz is an OpenStreetMap consumer!

(I also do a lot of OSM mapping, so I know my edits when I see them :D)

I know! Too bad they don't contribute more, because they've got lots of very precise data from different public organizations.

In Québec, Apple Maps is pretty good for directions in french language. I asked relatives in France and they say Apple Maps has improved a lot, and is better than Google Maps on public transit because of the better lisibility of lines, easy to use integration of realtime schedules (one click on a stop) and subway stations maps.

It's also better in Japan[0]. Can't comment about China but it's probably ok there.

[0] transit directions have been better since they first came out, Google Maps has gotten worse recently by switching to a cheaper basemap provider

The Apple Maps navigation view gives much less your actual perspective and much more an overhead view than either Google Maps or TomTom, and when driving this causes me to make way too many wrong turns (especially at roundabouts).

I really wish they'd fix this. I've even wondered sometimes if it could be part of their data deal with TomTom that they won't complete by offering proper first-person perspective navigation.

> make way too many wrong turns (especially at roundabouts)

I don't know how - Apple Maps clearly states to take the Nth exit out of the roundabout for me.

I always have spoken instructions turned off and drive by following the map view. This works fine for me with Google Maps and TomTom, but not Apple.

I prefer Waze over both Apple and Google Maps in the U.K. The chosen routes are better and the traffic, police and speed camera reports seem very accurate.

Apple Maps desperately needs an offline mode, but for me, it's better in LA on the freeways because they at least make an attempt to show you what lane to be in. Lane guidance usually works on surface streets, too, which is nice but not as important, except when it's vital. I seem to remember Google Maps having this at one point but they certainly don't care enough to lately, as far as I can tell.

Everyone is against google maps, I have only good experiences. In Europe, if it matters.

It gets me to the right place through several choices.

This is from someone who now intensely hates google for having me kicked off Google Apps/Suite with a 15 years old account.

The only problem I have is that the indications are not always clear on some road splits, sand they the French language is sometimes surprisingly weird.

If only they'd whitelist osmand for the use in Android auto, I'd never use Google maps.

For me, their biggest anti-feature is that they show buildings only on a very high zoom level, basically when only a couple of buildings for the screen. It used to be at a block level, where you reliably see many surrounding buildings. OSMand is way better now in this regard and can be easily configured.

Just for fun, try the walk button.

I travel a lot, and usually like walking, but last year it became impossible to use Google Maps for that because it no longer shows paths that cross freeways, even when there are perfectly fine sidewalks. (GMaps directions show 4.2 miles from my hotel to the train station that is actually 2 blocks away in Delray Beach, Florida)

I use Google Maps for biking around the city, if I'm going somewhere unfamiliar. It often seems to take non-optimal paths that presumably many hundreds of peoples worth of data should have told it could be improved. But it does eventually get you where you're going at least.

I like that when I use Apple Maps, Google doesn't know exactly where I am/coming rom/going to. It's hard to trust that information is in safe hands and won't be passed off. I'm not saying Apple is a saint, but I trust them more to run maps without selling my location details. I just wished Apple Maps worked better overseas.

Long time apple phone users (since the first), never used Maps after it had me try to drop someone off at a train station by giving me directions to the highway that ran over the train station (!!!) while saying I was arriving at the station.

Will try it out again though. Google maps is pretty solid in my experience. Voice recognition is great in google apps for some reason.

I tried to use Apple Maps for 2 years right after Covid hit when I decided to de-google my life.

I found it to be “ok” and sometimes terrible.

* no bike lanes (even though my country is famous for them)

* public transit sometimes recommends longer routes

* terrible UI for public transit. Specifically in how times are communicated for multi-mode routes.

* worse POI discoverability then google maps

* missing places and businesses

as a person often on a motorcycle, apple maps has completely won me over for directions while riding. i have found it more natural to follow and more precise (eg. lane choices, light counts) with equivalent traffic information.

edit to add - google maps directions have felt (borderline?) dangerous at times. i haven't yet experienced that with apple maps.

Does anyone use osmand+ here for navigation? It works great if the destination exists, but the main trouble for me is that the destinations that i care about don't exist most of time. By the time, I realize, I'm in a hurry to add them to osm and so I go back to google maps and the vicious cycle continues.

I use Apple Maps as my daily driver but I keep Google Maps around to double-check traffic. It generally has more traffic data, likely from having a larger user base, and (I assume) is therefore more accurate about delays.

I also keep Waze around for the occasional road trip where unexpected speed traps might be a concern.

I’m always surprised that Google never implemented Apple’s feature of telling you what exit to take at a tube station. It makes Apple way better for any journey that involves a large tube station in London. Apple has had that for a long time now too, I think since they had public transit directions.

This is super important in London which has some of the widest-spaced exits I've encountered - you can easily go half a mile wrong if you pick the incorrect exit at some stations.

I do not own an Apple device, but when my sister had to tell me directions one day, in my car, Apple maps told us to drive down a bike only street. The entrance is blocked so cars can not get through. That street has never been for cars, so I have no idea why it would tell us to go that way.

I’m in this camp, I try to use Apple Maps for navigation when I’m driving now. Much better in SF/the bay

Was just discussing switching back to Apple Maps with a friend.

I do like Google Map's allows me to group together addresses. When I come across some place, I can easily add it to a curated list for retrieval later.

Apple maps just lets you add locations, but as far as I am aware, I have no way to organize locations.

You can create a ‘guide’, which is a list of POIs in Apple maps. I’ve got one for French restaurants near me :)

Google is better, but Apple maps is perfectly useful these days. They actually respond to suggestions on updating their map as well. I have pointed out that a couple uturns are not valid options and both times within a couple of weeks they updated the problem.

I thought i'd missed something and Apple Maps was now available on non-Apple platforms. Sadly, it's still iOS and macOS only. The top search results all suggest using DDG and using the maps option there, which apparently uses Apple Maps.

:sigh:

https://developer.apple.com/maps/web/ MapKit for web!

Google Maps developed an infuriating trait during my own usage of it: the shy, disappearing street names!

its a real battle at times messing around with the zoom and centering to figure how to make it display the name of a road I care about.

Yes Apple Maps is much better than google maps.

The way it zooms out when driving to give an overview The instructions are a bit better in my town. A lot of subtle improvements over the years.

I'm just happy Apple Maps now acknowledges the existence of the town I work in and understands the reservation actually has gas stations. It's been quite the leap in the last couple of years.

Does anybody know why Apple Maps will still show directions when an iPhone is locked (basically turns the wallpaper into the directions), but for Google Maps you have to actually unlock the phone?

Isn’t this dangerous?

How do you suppose it’s dangerous?

Unlocking the phone while driving to see maps is probably more dangerous than anything else I can imagine; you can blame Apple for not allowing Google Maps to update the Lock Screen, though I understand why it would be that way.

If you’re supposing that someone puts in directions and then loses their phone while en-route; then that the person who finds the phone knows the intended destination? That seems like a vanishingly small risk.

Is there any mapping service available which shows directions based off of OpenStreetMap[0]?

https://www.openstreetmap.org/

https://organicmaps.app/ and https://www.magicearth.com/ are two Apps I use which can route you (also with your phone being off the network).

The OSM Wiki has a long list of routing services: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM-based_servic...

The hover text on the XKCD mentions OpenStreetMaps but just checked openstreetmap.org and they still don't seem to have public transit directions. Is there something that prevents them from getting that information?

They also didn't understand a text query like "address to address"

I mean it does say "Open Street Map" not "Open Rail Map."

You got me there lol

But in many areas (not everywhere) it's very good for hiking trails, thanks to lots of volunteer contributors.

OSM is ultimately a crowdsourced, volunteer-surveyed database. Timetables (which are essential for public transport routing) don't really jibe with that.

You could certainly build a map client which integrated third-party timetable data from operators and transport authorities, probably using OpenTripPlanner as a backend. But openstreetmap.org is designed simply to reflect OpenStreetMap data, not any third-party data.

It's a weird balance where the OpenStreetMap.org website claims not to be meant for usability, but everything about it screams the opposite. A convenient search box, share button, all the stuff you'd expect, except then it doesn't work very well and it's even worse on mobile.

Officially, it's a tech demo to showcase what you can do with the data. Unofficially, crazies like me use it daily but need to fall back to other websites for various purposes:

- overpass-turbo.eu for data queries (showing all the tourism=viewpoint nodes in an area, or all the supermarkets, for example)

- OsmAnd for simpler queries like looking for a nearby bench while on the move (note that this also works fully offline, the only data it ever needs is for map file updates or if you want stuff like satellite imagery)

- OsmAnd for showing which of the fifteen bus stops across three areas my bus will actually be at. For example, this bus station has stop positions inside, outside, on the other side of the street with a traffic light to cross, around the corner... https://snipboard.io/DJUbVd.jpg It's madness, I walked up and down the whole area twice (took a while, missed my connection) before discovering the stop position around the corner, shown on the left on this screenshot. Had I just used OSM, it would have been clear where to go. Most transport apps don't show this, they just tell you to go and find H13 somewhere. Link to the bus line object shown in screenshot, btw: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1514901

- map.meurisse.org for distance measurement

- maps.openrouteservice.org for more complex routing, e.g. with waypoints or time estimation with a specific maximum speed

- when driving somewhere unfamiliar or with a tight deadline, I'll fall back to google maps which is the only source of accurate traffic info that I know of (in NL there are loops in the road which are open data, but idk if anyone built a site around it, and with the public transport network I don't drive there often anyway)

To your specific question, OsmAnd can actually do public transport routing effectively in various countries using the data in OSM which is absolutely mind blowing impressive to me. But at the same time, I'm not sure why they bothered because without time table info it's pretty useless.

I think that's absolutely fair comment, but osm.org isn't deliberately hard-to-use - it's just that not a vast amount of effort has gone into the frontend. If you enjoy hacking on the codebase then contributions are very much welcome. It would be great to get some of the mobile CSS issues sorted, for example. The main site is Rails and JS, while Nominatim (the search backend) has bits of Python and PHP. Happy to give further pointers if you're interested.

> osm.org isn't deliberately hard-to-use

That's what I heard, though, or more specifically that it's not meant to replace google maps in the first place and is more of a data showcase than a proper product.

Of course I could be wrong, would be interesting to know

It's not meant to replace Google Maps as an end-user product, indeed. But fixing the mobile UI doesn't mean trying to replace Google Maps, it just means fixing the mobile UI.

http://mapy.cz is based on OpenStreetMap and covers some of your use cases

Apple Maps is great for “safe” navigation. Over time Google Maps have become more Waze-like.

Another great thing about Apple Maps is the haptic signaling on the watch.

I just wish apple would fix that terrible Yelp issue. I have to install an app and make an account just to see the reviews and pictures??

Apple Maps still cannot give directions via bicycle yet GMaps can. Maybe it's better in other cities, but that doesn't help me.

Probably user error, but I can't ever seem to get apples maps to orient with the car like Google's automatically does.

There's a button (I think shaped like a compass arrow) to do this, which toggles between facing north and facing the direction you are traveling.

I think what's most interesting is that xkcd knows that it's the right time to release this type of comic. In other words, they play a hell of a meta game. Look at this thread, it's mostly a bunch of applause for Apple Maps with some healthy critique mixed in. I've been happily using Apple Maps for years now and would have shared this thought if this had been released 2 years ago. But likely not enough other people would have felt the same at that time for this to be a generally relevant piece of social commentary.

I use Apple Maps for privacy. If I search for any business in Google maps I’ll get ads for it for weeks.

Is there a reasonable alternative to Google Maps API for traffic aware routing and duration estimates?

Mapbox has an API: https://www.mapbox.com/traffic-data

I'm waiting for someone to build a Google Maps alternative (generic consumer oriented) product with Mapbox, their maps (OpenStreetMap based) are awesome.

(Not Mapbox [1], but) have you looked at https://www.qwant.com/maps/ ? Looks and feels a bit like Google Maps. I don’t know about traffic data, though.

[1]: Qwant uses https://openmaptiles.org/

Yeah! I'm really supportive of their services.

I've found their maps are very slow here in Australia (I assume their infra is Europe based), and the I find the geocoding frequently gives me objects in other countries when I know OSM has an object with that exact name in my map view, but I check up on it every so often.

> I assume their infra is Europe based

Qwant is a French company, so yes: https://about.qwant.com/en/contact

I'm curious to try Apple maps. Unfortunately I couldn't find it on the play store ;)

I just downloaded it to try it again, but I quickly discovered it has no offline support.

Maybe in the US, but I still find Google maps to be far better in Europe

Boo! Still no cycle maps outside of London in the UK.

I only used AM when I was out of the country and didn’t have data. You could load the maps at the hotel and they would still work, I think because they’re vector based whereas GM is pixel- ?

All modern map apps are completely terrible. Most of the time Apple maps doesn't draw any labels. The actual map is almost purely decorative.

HERE maps was one of the last to keep scales and was guaranteed to label a street if you zoomed in. But after looking at their web viewer, both features have been dropped.

Most "map" apps are more for exploring where gas/food/etc is so directions can be generated and less about being a useful map.

Agreed, I hate when streets on maps don't have labels. It would be so easy to do.

Oh my god, this is such a huge pet peeve of mine, particularly when walking or riding a bike. They draw out the path on the map but 90% of the streets aren't labeled, including the street you're supposed to turn on.

I've been bitten by this recently and I think it's because they're still following paper map rules for labels - like they'll[1] put the street name halfway down the street even if you're zoomed into the first 5% of it because that's what you'd do on a paper map and it would work fine there.

(I'd also like the option for bigger / contrastier labels and a way to turn off all the business names because 99% of the time I don't want them cluttering up the map when I'm just flaneuring about London.)

[1] Apple Maps and Google Maps both suffer from this. maps.me also suffers from it but inconsistently - sometimes it'll put it at 50%, sometimes it'll double up at 33% and 66%, sometimes it'll just not label a road...

I don't understand why they can't figure it out, just fucking slide the text to where it's visible.

Maybe something on Open Street Map? Worst case, it's all open source so you could hack that back into a client.

I find it almost impossible to read street names, park names, etc on Google Maps.

When I need to orient myself better and especially when outdoors on foot I prefer mapy.cz, they have also a very nice Android app (I don't know if they have one for iPhones) which also gives offline maps. I think they at least partially use OSM, but very nice presentation and smoothness is there. Much better than OSM-And (which last time I used a few years ago).

OsmAnd "online maps" are much smoother than the default vector maps, because your phone doesn't have to render them (they also take more space).

I find OsmAnd incredible for

- hiking (lots of useful maps, possibility to add overlays like mountain slopes, satellite images, possibility to add maps from other sources as long as you have the tile URL, all maps can be downloaded and used offline, great Altitude/Slope graphs, POI searching),

- cycling (navigation works very well, CyclOSM shows useful information, BRouter for serious bike routing),

- driving (navigation works offline, good as a backup or if you don't like Waze showing you McDonald's ads every time you stop).

Also it's a free software (that you can still pay to help the developers).

thank goodness. maybe my family will lay off of the "why do you use Apple maps?"

This post just 10x’d Apple Maps’ engagement.

Apple Maps is objectively superior to Google Maps, especially when it comes to directions and vehicular navigation. Fite me.

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