Google Maps' moat is evaporating (2020)
joemorrison.substack.com
joemorrison.substack.com
One of my biggest motivating factors is that I'm nearly trapped in google search for things that involve local search and wanting to see a map, distance to drive, x,y or z in my area.
I've also just recently stumbled onto the https://osmand.net/blog/osmand-android-4-1-released/ ability to load into my car so that's neat.
* The jank you mention - it was one of the first things I noticed as well.
* Search just doesn't work. They have addresses and POI in their database, but for whatever reason, search strings don't match, and addresses don't work at all either. It's completely broken.
* Really needs the ability to toggle direction mode, i.e. always pointing north, or pointing in the direction of travel or the device's compass.
I also would like to add a couple improvements that are not really flaws with the app:
* Ability to record GPS path
* Ability to share recordings/trails - would allow me to get rid of AllTrails
This largely rectified the address search in OSMAnd for me, though it does not update automatically and so requires occasional reapplication.
Hope that helps!
Also, the direction mode toggle you mention does exist, and works quite well. The flipside of Osmand's awesome configurability is that it takes me 5 minutes of digging to figure out how to enable things like this.
It does this.
> * Ability to record GPS path
It does this.
There is also an option for "pointing north", "pointing in the direction on the compass", "pointing in the direction of movement". It's not intuitive though: double-tap the compass icon.
I know that sounda crazy but here me out. One of Microsoft's old tricks is called FUD. It stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. The idea is that people's opinions of things can be nudged using fear, uncertainty and doubt. Enough to sway opinion at scale.
In this case, if you truly believed an app is superb, you're doing it a massive disservice by giving it your criticism publicly. I know, I know, how dare I suggest you not provide useful feedback on a public forum. But the thing is, I believe your single comment will prevent a not insignificant amount of adoption! Adoption by the masses often helps these projects undertake QoL improvements like what your comment describes.
Contradictorily, I believe honest critism of entrenched apps made by huge corporations is vital to help the smaller guys get a chance to share the wealth for exatly the same reasons.
I also firmly believe it can only backfire spectacularly. What you are explicitly advocating is asymmetric FUD "for the good guys".
And it's not like people won't notice the scrolling and re-draw of the app; I've experienced it myself and it's a massive deal breaker for regular usage :| . If anything, saying "I enjoy this app even with this crappy aspect", may help people get over that initial, immediate hump and see the value in rest of the product.
There is also expectation management, which is an important aspect in marketing. The goal here is to set the expectation of a future user at the actual value the product delivers to the user. This can go wrong in two ways: 1. Underdeliver - user will be disappointed, i.e. negative user experience. 2. Overdeliver - user will be content, but expects you to overdeliver in the future as well, which you will not be able to do indefinitely.
My point is: it is key to manage expectations of future users. Pointing out both strengths and weaknesses of the product makes sure expectations match actual value and make for an overall positive user experience when evaluating for adoption.
So.. You know, do the devs a favour and don't market against them? It doesn't harm you to just stay out of it if you don't have anything nice to say. Go dunk on the big corps. They can financially handle it.
Marketing is a much broader field [1]. Of course a part of it is about how to effectively convey an idea to someone. However, deceiving people will only work for short-term businesses, as it is much more work to build your image after a deception or schandal. That is why brands often cease to exist after a schandal, as starting a new brand is much easier.
I developed an open source app myself and I'd rather inform future users about its limitations before they use it. This way, they have a positive feeling towards the app, even though it could not deliver value in their case. This has nothing to do with budget (for my open source project, budget is ~0 anyways). You need budget for advertising, reaching out to potential customers, engage with your customers, etc. The budget needed for clearly communicating the value of your product is negligible.
You seem to think that downsides or limitations are inherently negative. Knowing a downside in advance is actually a huge advantage.
[1]: "Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
One of the main benefits of OSS is to “see the truth” by seeing the source and can skip all the marketing lies from commercial products.
Lots of difference with open-source products.
As for my controversial take, I'm just trying to limit the abuse of our collective goodwill by marketers, generally. They take advantage of our good nature as we assume the best possible interpretation of their actions/words, or pretend as if the generosity of FOSS devs deserve the same criticism as a trillion dollar company just because the end results look the same on our phone. People would see it differently if they stood everyone at Google beside everyone at OSMAnd for example. Google has an astonishing 135,000 (or more) employees. OSMAnd has 20 if you include major contributors.
For visual reference, here is what 113000 people looks like: https://inteng-storage.s3.amazonaws.com/images/import/2017/0... Google has 20-30 thousand more than that.
20 people don't fill up a bus.
(I am one of contributors and recently completed small round of UX testing, see https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/discussions... )
StreetComplete is great but it is focused on updating broad range of existing objects. Every Door on the other hand is the best for adding and updating POIs.
But it seems to me case where data to enter is simply complex and I see no obvious way to make it easier.
What worse, typically multiple days have the same opening hours, so interface is optimized to make this kind of input easier (ability to select multiple days at once)
(I am one of contributors to that software)
It's been a while since I used it, but one thing that might help would be to look at the interface the for Alarms in Android. It looks pretty similar, but it's a little bit different, and I think a little bit easier to use.
Moonshot: Let users snap a picture and use OCR to suggest times that user can then edit.
Another idea to make it a bit easier for businesses with odd hours: A option for a wizard.
Something like:
1. Click here to start Wizard
2. Monday: Select open time (or say not opened)
3. Monday: Select closed time
4. Monday: Option to add another time block
5. Tuesday: Option to copy and modify times from Monday
6. Repeat
7. Option to copy time from Monday/Tuesday
8. Repeat, etc
I'm not sure how exactly this would play out, and it would only be good in the more complex cases but I personally think it would be easier.
Um... OK.
he notes 'look around' as an example of apple reaching parity, but that's such a minor feature, and a great example of where apple has misplaced its priorities. apple needs to do a much better job of getting accurate POI (places of interest) and being able to search on those on just about any facet a user can imagine. beyond the basics of roads, addresses, and directions, that's the killer feature of maps. instead, they create slightly better 3D renderings of urban buildings and tout that as some huge UX improvement in their annual keynote.
apple, please actually improve the killer feature and not everything else. i want to retire google maps (and waze) for good on my devices.
I know this is a pretty bay area centric site, but for most of the US Google has this feature and Apple still doesn't. Around 20 cities total, with a heavy concentration in California. For about of third of the states in the US they cover a single city, the majority of states they have nothing.
EDIT - what's particularly surprising to me is how thorough Apple's rollout has been in Canada compared to the US. They've got every city and every highway, as well as getting off the highway to drive tiny towns like Warren Ontario where the total points of interest are one fire hall, one post office, one cafe, one restaurant, one credit union, one mechanic, and one gas station.
https://duckduckgo.com/?va=j&t=hb&q=warren+ontario&ia=web&ia...
Why have they done so much in Canada, but are missing tons of major places in the US still? Houston but not Dallas or Austin, Miami but not Jacksonville or Orlando, Philly but not Pittsburgh, not Nashville or Memphis or Knoxville, not Colombus or Cleveland or Cincinnati. Not to mention the entire country outside of large cities.
Just makes me wonder what's going on over there. Did they drive a ton of miles and then realize their US cars were collecting defective data? Accidentally deleted a datacenter?
>What seems to be happening is that there are actually two versions of Look Around. One version has POI labels,and the other does not.
This suggests that it takes Apple much longer to process the Look Around imagery that has POIs. And it’s likely that during this same processing, Apple is also extracting other features from its imagery (like road markings and real-life building colors) that are, in turn, being used to generate the new “city experience”.
In other words, Apple’s Look Around coverage in the U.S. and U.K. is so limited right now because Apple is likely still processing it and intends to show POI labels throughout both countries.
https://www.justinobeirne.com/look-around-united-states-cove...
Disappointing because I'd like to have the non-POI version working and have no interest in a $2000 AR thing.
Maybe I just rely less on the POI aspect of the service than you do? I tend to use navigation more, which if anything is better on Apple.
Regarding directions, I find Apple Maps more accurate in the time to destination and the UI much more pleasing. That said, if there is a ramp closed, Google is more likely to know about it.
For reviews, I find Google and Yelp mostly useless, Google's reviews appear spammed while yelp is known for removing bad reviews for money. Google has some neat insights like "how busy is it now", but I've found it to be very unreliable, Yelp can sometimes let you get in line at a restaurant. Google will have more photos usually, so that's a win.
At least for transit, the UI is middling at best and downright confusing at times. For example, taking a bus or subway only shows you the origin and destination stops (with the route and stops in a secondary view), while every other app prominently shows you the approaching stop and how many stops left to the destination. Once you get off the bus/subway and need walking directions, Apple Maps does not switch, something many transit first apps will do.
For me, the app with the best UI for public transport is hands down the Transit app. It's also the only app I've seen that will ask to confirm which bus you boarded if different buses approached your stop at the same time. Plus, the app will update transfer options based on your ETA.
UI/UX aside, for route planning with public transport Citymapper is still the best.
Citymapper is also the only app that handles train or bus disruptions somewhat gracefully - I've had both Google and Apple maps offer routes on trains that were currently not running.
Aren't all train tickets the same price in NYC? In Tokyo, there's a bunch of different train companies, and every fare is different depending on the company, where you're going, if you're doing a transfer, etc.
>or which train car to board for efficient transfers
Because it would be useless: in America, there's absolutely no concept of a train stopping at the same place in a station every time. There could be a half-train-length difference between where one train stops, and where the next train stops on the same tracks in the same station, because the operators are so sloppy. Here in Tokyo, they stop at the exact same place every time: there's automated doors on the platform that have to line up with the train doors in many stations, and specific places to stand marked on the platform with markings for which car number will be there.
Subway trains, yes, but not the commuter rail. Plus, while on the subway network one transfer to and from the bus network is free, your route might require you to make multiple transfers that are not free. In addition, there are also cross borough express buses that are more expensive. Citymapper is the only app that shows total prices alongside the route options.
in America, there's absolutely no concept of a train stopping at the same place in a station every time. There could be a half-train-length difference between where one train stops, and where the next train stops on the same tracks in the same station, because the operators are so sloppy.
Not the case at all. The NYC subway conductors are required to manually point to "Zebra Boards" aligned with the center of the platform at every single stop - a practice that originated in Japan. Some stations also need platform gap fillers to be extended when the train arrives, which also requires trains to stop at very specific points at the platform. NYC subway platforms also have markings to stand for where the train door will be.
This is all to say that it is indeed possible to know which train car to board for efficient transfer or exit. Google Maps only provides information on which exit or entrance to use at the station, but nothing about the platform itself. Citymapper tells you that the best location to board the train is towards the back, for example.
Interesting, I guess I didn't notice this last time I was in NYC.
In DC (where I lived for years until recently), this stuff just isn't the case at all. There's no way to predict where the operator will stop the train, and it can be many car-lengths different from operator to operator.
"turn left in 600 ft" vs "turn left at the Jack in the Box up ahead."
IMHO the single largest improvement to Google Maps in the last few years has been the inclusion of traffic lights on the map. Location data, especially in cities, is often spotty and can be plus or minus a block, knowing I should turn at the stop light, or one intersection before the stop light, is the single most useful bit of information Google Maps gives me, and it is unfortunate I have to look down at my screen to glean this bit of important data.
I've listened to the instructions Uber's mapping app gives to drivers, and it also seems to be an improvement over what Google Maps has.
> apple needs to do a much better job of getting accurate POI (places of interest)
Parking garages is a huge one. The day Google Maps added parking structure information for corporate offices (well over a decade ago) it became far more useful. It doesn't always have it, but when it does, super nice.
Google Maps used to also accept tons of community contributions, for better and for worse. I am sad to see them go though, some people used to update food truck information regularly, and still today you can see the last location a food truck was marked as being at!
Edit: Google Maps has also gotten pathologically obsessed with the "technically fastest" route over the years. At present, they will regularly direct drivers to do stupid things like turn left across 3-4 lanes of highway traffic, instead of going down 1 block and using an intersection that has a left turn signal. Are Google's directions technically 1 minute faster? Sure, at the cost of 1 extra white hair on my head. Not a good trade off.
Telling drivers to turn left across traffic costs far more than that. It contributes directly to gridlock, which wastes everyone's time and fuel.
It's inexcusable that turn-by-turn providers don't allow an option to disable or at least penalize left turns in their routing algorithm. UPS figured this out, what, 20 years ago?
This is something I wanted for years. I was so happy when I finally started seeing it in Google Maps and Apple Maps.
I've noticed that Apple Maps recently added their own review system with the thumbs up and down, so it looks like they're trying to get there.
In my experience both Apple Maps and Google Maps can give unreasonable directions for public transport, with the best in class being Citymapper. It's also the only service that provides guidance on which subway car to board (closest exit for transfers, for example).
I've seen more than one case where Google has clearly used OCR on streetview imagery to add business to their database (OCR typos and all). They also OCR signs to improve driving directions, and update street names, and they also use OCR to extract speed limit data for roads, as most places don't have a single easily accessible database of speed limits.
I think it's reasonable to assume that Apple is gonna be doing the same things. Sure it also feeds some pretty UI, but if you wanna know where things are, then photographing the entire world is a pretty robust approach.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hollywood+sign&t=h_&ia=places&iaxm...
Another issue is that business owners immediately think Google and add their new business to Google maps, but not many think about Apple maps. Maybe this might change in the future, but I think Apple will need to add some grease to incentivize that effort.
This is the equivalent of a phone and location directory, and it should not be locked up by Google (or another commercial vendor for that matter).
yelp is was a smart way to get a jump start on place data, but apple should have spent much more time and effort (and some of it's $100B+ warchest) on getting this to a much more useful place on their own, especially if it really has designs on challenging google in the autonomous car space.
as a product manager, i can only shake my head when i see such a basic flubbing.
Well at least I now know how those cyclists get onto the Autobahn because not realising that Apple Maps doesn't have cycle routing, the poor man almost ended up on a highway.
I think driving directions are similar or slightly better in Apple Maps. But finding the place where you want to go is where Apple is behind. Misplaced, duplicate, missing POIs is what we learned to expect. Apple needs to find a way to motivate all kinds of businesses to put themselves and their opening hours on their map.
Cycle ways are also quite well documented here. It shouldn't be an issue at all. Especially in such a big city. They even use OSM data officially.
My guess is: they just don't care because the market is not good enough and most of their customers are happy with car navigation. According to the wiki page [+] they have cycling maps in China which is ridiculous if you consider the bike infrastructure in Germany. It isn't if you consider the market.
I asked for directions to my daughter's school. It took me somewhere 5 miles away, but in the general area.
It's not a small or unknown school either, it's a well known and large preparatory school.
That's the kind of first experience that turns people off for good - I know it did me.
Also, for what it's worth, I definitely miss Street View; it's not just a novelty, and I'm glad Apple added their own version. I'm not impressed with the Apple version's current coverage, but I'm hoping it improves
- Maps won't show all of the results in the map view
- Maps prioritizes these kinds of chains that pay good money over more relevant restaurants (for instance, I searched "Cafe" in Boston last week, and both McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts were among the top 5 results. Not exactly the most relevant results)
- no matter how much you zoom in, Maps just won't show you certain businesses. I'm not sure if they haven't payed up enough protection money to Google, or if the business listing isn't optimized, or what... but it's a crap experience when I know there's a great business in a general area but every time I search, Google zooms me out to shove Wendy's in my face
Do other people experience these same issues with Google Maps? Am I somehow using the product wrong? I've been trying to contribute to OSM and use it instead when possible, but the POI data just isn't quite complete enough... and businesses almost never update their own hours on OSM.
i'm not saying google results are perfect, far from it, but they certainly don't typically do the above.
but yah, foo anything is like a box of chocolates. you just never know what you're gonna get!
Why isn’t Waze integrated more into GMaps? I’ve heard they use it as a beta platform to test features but I rarely use google maps so I have no clue.
* if you want to take the silliest route possible to a store that went out of business three years ago, but Apple thinks is open until 6pm on Tuesday
So even Apple users don't want to use Apple Maps.
It's possible these re-downloads are utterly swamped by people picking apps out of the app store. But it can't hurt to have a huge base of legacy installs that reduplicate every time someone gets a new device.
Maps are social. When I search for a place in Google maps, I get reviews, pictures, it feels alive.
When I search for a place on Apple Maps, firstly it may not even exist because who cares about Apple maps, and secondly it's likely to have few reviews or photos.
I just tried with a local restaurant. Google maps has dozens of photos and 100 reviews. Apple maps has 1 review and no photos.
If you just need a satnav, then Apple maps is OK I guess, if it has the place you're going to. But why take the risk? I never open the thing.
It was listed in 7th place in this 2021 year-end round-up:
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/02/apple-most-downloaded-a...
> So even Apple users don't want to use Apple Maps.
I don't think that this follows from your claim. I have both Google Maps and Apple Maps but use Google Maps only for street view. I use Apple Maps for nearly everything including navigation.
That's United States only.
Plus, we aren't even talking about Waze which is also owned by Google and probably has more users than Apple Maps.
I wish there was a VR mode where you can turn your view by rotating the phone.
But it's even more terrible than Google Maps. It still has the bike shop that closed over 3 1/2 years ago and not the new shop. I just found a "restaurant" that is the actual address of a local food truck it seems (German legal imprint), and the "book shop" I did not know about seems to be a warehouse because I can't find the address on their home page. But at least some of the shops are correct...
I’m a user in India and nothing, absolutely nothing comes close to Google maps in both urban and rural areas.
10 years ago, most of the alternatives mentioned didn't even work in certain US cities or specific countries, and that's changed. It's only a matter of time before that holds true in India, and beyond. What that slow and steady march towards parity does to a moat can certainly be described as "evaporation".
Personally I think it does because frankly speaking this sort of change tends to happen in the US/Canada and maybe a handful of other western countries at best and nowhere else, for reasons far greater than tech enthusiasts' belly-aching.
Take Apple Maps as an alternative, for example, which is pretty much only available on Apple devices and can thus not march towards parity amongst populations that simply cannot afford Apple devices (which is the majority of people on Earth). It's not just "a matter of time" before Apple Maps is a real challenger in India, because iPhones have a low-single-digit market share there. It would take actual significant action such as Apple releasing Apple Maps for Android for it to even be in the running, and even if that happens then it would still need to contend with Google Maps' existing foothold.
It's open source, development is very active, and there's much more of a focus on user experience (2/3 of the pinned issues).
Though it does notably lack public transportation routing.
It doesn't show you as much detail as it could. The color scheme has a poor contrast. The colored zones are ambiguous and often misleading. You see a random-looking sample of points of interest rather than a consistent listing of every single location of a certain category and significance. Major roads and streets are easy to see, while railroads fade into the background. And sometimes you can see major bridges only by zooming in, as Google Maps thinks they must be insignificant because you can't drive over them.
This is true specifically for cars and maybe mass transit. But for navigating on foot or bicycle, OSM is much better. OSM tells me where water fountains and park benches are, and has far more trails marked. Google Maps excels at leading people to places they might spend money, and is mediocre at most anything else.
Of course, you still need country-specific code to account for all the various abbreviations, e.g. Str. in German, or the cardinal directions and road type abbreviations common in the US (blvd, hwy, dr, etc. ... I've recently fixed a bunch of those in OSM and it's quite a list). Well, and checking alt_name, local names and names in other languages in OSM as well.
Bike routes "work" at best.
I actually find Google's routing pretty frustrating. Maybe in cities you want the shortest/fastest route given the traffic, but outside of cities other factors are at play, such as road quality (ie width, straightness, max speed) and directions simplicity. The usual "one size fits all" approach of Google is sorely lacking. Map routing is crying out for customizability.
It was worse when Google Maps tried routing us around traffic by sending us off the highway and down on narrow roads through neighbourhoods and side roads. Poor people living there suddenly had a main road along their homes. This kind of thing should be regulated.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine in Oklahoma says he never uses Google Maps to navigate because it has a bad habit of trying to route him down unimproved ranch roads of dubious quality.
Personally, I usually prefer Apple Maps since it plays nicer with CarPlay, and while Ohio has fewer roads of dubious quality like that, my experience left me much less trusting of GMaps.
I've been working on a faster OSM plotter for a while now, but the data format is really a pain.
I don't know how accurate it is compared to the tons of Android smartphones sharing their location to Google, but in areas with many Tesla it is good enough.
Facebook is on the ropes, completely rudderless with a big phone attached to their collective face. Mapillary might as well have been converted to neutrinos when Facebook acquired it.
Microsoft does not now nor did at any time possess a consumer map product that anybody gave a damn about. They do have a nice competitor to Google Earth Engine, that's cool. GEE is awesome by the way and the article fails to discuss it meaningfully.
Mapbox the company completely imploded after taking a huge round from softbank, failing to IPO, and going to war against its own key staff members.
Really the fact that the article goes all the way to the end without even mentioning Esri says a lot.
Not a consumer map produce, but the maps, weather, and imagery in Flight Simulator is pretty awesome.
https://www.polygon.com/microsoft-flight-simulator-guide/213...
What happened here?
But then it gets worse. Suppose the page is still loading. For some arcane reason, part of the interface loads, then the map, then the rest of the interface. If you can't find the navigation buttons for pan and zoom, they are exactly where you first looked they simply weren't displayed yet. The interface also used to make it easy to drop pins and measure distances. Just basic quality of life utility that a good online map should have.
How did gmaps get worse? If they did literally nothing it would be better. Someone came in at some point and decided "this isn't designed enough" and proceeded to hide or rip out features. Superficial minimalism. It's not simplification, it's reduction.
Definitely still room for improvement from Apple here, but they seem way more engaged and invested than Google does at this point.
Disc: Googler but nowhere close to the Maps team.
I will also readily admit that I may be a marginal case here, but Apple's more subtle treatment serves obsessive pinners like me without cluttering the map.
Nowadays the ads seem really bad when I see somebody else using it.
One of the things I especially like about osmand. is that the developers(developer?) don't have some designer running rampant, reducing user agency in the name of minimalism. If I want 15 different status overlays cluttering up my map I can have them. It is great.
There were strong complaints from within about the price changes. Obviously everyone couldn't believe what was being planned, and there were countless spreadsheets and reports and SQL queries showing how this was going to shit all over a lot of customers that we'd be guaranteed to lose to a competitor.
Management didn't give a shit.
I don't know what the rationale was apart from some vague claim about "charging for value". A lot of users of the API apparently were basically under the free limits or only spending less than 100 USD on API usage so I can kind of understand the line of thought, but I still.thibk they went way too far.
I don't know what happened to the architects of the plan. I presume promo.
Edit: I should add that this was not a knee-jerk thing or some exec just woke up one day with an idea in their dreams. It was a planned change that took many months to plan and prepare for with endless preparations and reporting and so on.
I honestly think Larry and Sergei want their piggy bank to grow and put people in charge who would focus on on thing only: stock price.
https://jakecoppinger.blog/articles/the-best-apps-for-bicycl...
Still not perfect, since cycling route quality is ultimately a bit subjective, but far better than Google Maps that makes objectively bad bike route decisions.
I believe even the poor account managers have a miserable life trying to convince the company to care for the clients.
Microsoft is the worst cloud, but I can talk to human beings quickly.
Last month I had a question about a (sadly inferior) stream processing service from Microsoft and was greet by a very good answer from the PRODUCT OWNER on stack overflow.
Fell in love for the product after that.
So, google, please stop selling services because you don't want to deal with costumers.
Ignoring Tesla FSD itself, just look at the generated map data. Imagine how much more we can get if we don't need to run this at 20fps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQkXcySUnJk
There’s https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/RapiD which helps users to add features based on AI predictions. Each feature has to be properly reviewed though. A blank import of such features won’t happen anytime soon.
> I mean just have a look at the visible amount of data in that link. You literally can see the swans. https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit#map=22/47.36686/8.54401
The swisstopo imagery is one of the better ones you can get, but swans should not be mapped in OSM ;)
OpenStreetMap (OSM), over the next decade, has the potential to do to Google what Android did to Apple: dramatically grow the overall market while drawing a clear line between the larger “open” ecosystem and the smaller “proprietary” one. The difference is that while Google Maps probably makes billions annually, it also probably costs billions to maintain, leaving it wallowing in a low-margin no-man’s land compared to its big brother Google Search.
Do you mean routes that might avoid great elevation changes or something?
This is counter-productive: it produces more CO2 for all the braking and accelerating.
What you need to do is don't drive 130 but drive 100 on the highway. Go behind a truck if you are okay with going that slowly (not to avoid wind, afaik then you'd have to be unsafely close, but behind a truck you cannot annoy other people because they need to overtake the truck anyhow). The downside: on an average commute of like 20 minutes, that costs you probably like 2 minutes extra (since top speed is far above average speed usually). The upside: your fuel consumption (fuel burned = CO2 created) is cut nearly in half, at least for the highway part of the trip. No braking also means less particulate matter from brake wear; no shifting back means less partial combustion. Or so I've read.
The most efficient speed (afaik): as slow as your car allows (~1000 rpm) in the highest gear it has.
I hope it goes without saying, though, that one should prioritize safety (go with the flow; worse/more(?) accidents happen in high speed difference zones) over efficiency gains.
Our EV likes to suggest a route that takes 33 minutes instead of 28, but uses 30% less electricity (and avoids rush hour backups, as a bonus). It's using HERE WeGo maps, from what I can tell. (They're underrated in my opinion. They're formerly known as Nokia Maps; it was the default on windows phone, still is free phones, and still works offline.)
"Eco friendly" is a function of the car's aerodynamics, weight, regenerative breaking, auto shutoff at traffic lights, etc, etc. It seems better left to the manufacturer to set those parameters.
Google maps is going the way if google search. I looked up directions from orikum to rinas and i first get a full page ads that's tricky to take off. Then 2/3 of the page is hotel ads.
Google is truly the king of monopolies. Maps, Videos, Search.
It really is remarkable and they will juice this forever.
A perfect description of Google as a whole.
I've lived in my house for two years. Google Maps still doesn't know it exists (Apple Maps does, but that is a recent development).
The number of business whose websites, directions, etc. have to note that Google Maps is lying to you, and under no circumstances turn right there, are staggering. As is the algorithm's deep desire to take you off a highway and send you down a gravel road because it's theoretically faster.
I think that would be great to familiarize yourself with a place you’ve never been to. More intuitive and less disorienting than tapping around on the screen.
[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-maps-poised-11-billion...
Not blockable by ad blockers, you have people with intent to drive by certain places, or drive to certain places.
OSM shows all businesses (as far as their data goes) and that is the right way to go. There are ways of dealing with clutter. The fact that I can't find what I know is there on Google Maps (unless I do a text search for it) is infuriating and a deal breaker.
Google Maps and Places actually both have a ton of paid use cases, largely around being embedded in other apps. My defunct events startup made heavy use of both.
Something this article neglects to mention is that Google Maps has an inherit advantage by being baked into Android. Even if Maps isn't using any private APIs or has any special permissions, the sheer install base that they can use to collect data gives them a technological lead over anyone who isn't Apple (or one of the large Chinese phone manufacturers in any of the markets they have large market share in).
Traffic data? Aggregated from millions upon millions (billions) of Android users. Restaurant busyiness? Google knows how many of their users are at a location. For quite awhile (not sure if this is still the case) if you took a photo of a restaurant on your phone, Google would just outright ask you to upload it to Google maps. Yelp can't compete with that!
As an aside, these are also some of the reasons why Microsoft kept fighting for some smartphone market share. There are so many things you can only do if you are installed by default everywhere.
Google can go up to websites "You should enable Google accounts for login because literally 70% of smartphone users have a Google account".
Boom, overnight market share in a related market, analytics data flows in at a furious rate, ad revenue keeps going up.
"Let your customers pay with Google pay, double digit % of all smartphone users have it setup."
Anyone who isn't Amazon or Apple (maybe Paypal due to historical market share) can replicate that salespitch, and for whatever reason Amazon stopped focusing on Pay with Amazon (no idea why, awesome product).
I'd eat the pain of going Osm (and I've been paying for OsmAnd+ for years) but it doesn't know where anything is, and when it does, the routes are pretty bad.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple
https://web.archive.org/web/20211204010048/http://gspa21.ls....
In particular,
> highly optimized results for complex search queries
Google has gotten almost completely worthless for these, but unfortunately no other search engine does a good job with them at this point either.
Mapy.cz are quite nice (sadly, they fail to mention source of data in violation of OSM license)
Many modern buildings just show a view of a building site!
If you need to do more things with a map (load tracks, show multiple things on the map at once, follow a very specific route), Google Maps is appallingly bad.
It has a few very frustrating UX issues but that would be nitpicking.
Now that they started forcing ads and social features, it got worse.