Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidjfelix | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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 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.

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 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

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 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.

> - 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.

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?)

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.

> 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.

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).

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 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

> - 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.

>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

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 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

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 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.

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…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com