Apple Maps turns 10 – and it’s finally worth using | Hacker News Reader

Apple Maps turns 10 – and it’s finally worth using

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11 pointsalwillis5 comments

It’s a nice map but you can’t find the stuff you need on the map.

Google Maps is a client for the catalogue, and more. I can find carpet cleaners near me, and message them and book them. I can find what I need anywhere in the world.

Apple Maps I can’t get cycling directions in Germany’s second largest city, a place so over-provisioned with dedicated cycle paths you’d think they were commissioned by Pret A Manger.

Apple Maps isn’t better than Waze or Google Maps for any widespread practical use case, it’s just pretty. I liked having haptic navigation on my watch in London, but it’s gone. I liked some of the car directions, but Waze just rolls over it.

It's very usable now, at least in the states, and I'm glad there's a viable competitor. However it's going to be an uphill battle again Google given the tight integration of Google Maps to the rest of its suite (Calendar, Search, etc.) and the fact that it has a Web UI.

if you're in a car*

*turn by turn bike directions in Madison, Wisconsin are absolutely horrid and basically unusable if you are on a bike path

I've been really impressed by turn-by-turn directions for walking (especially with the Apple Watch integration).

I haven't tried bike directions, but I'd imagine getting those right is tough in every state Apple doesn't have developers living in. So much of things like bike paths aren't mapped well in general. Even looking at OSM open source/crowdsourced data in my local area the bike maps miss obvious paths and include ones that are suboptimal and you still need a lot of local knowledge even when the data was already supposedly crowdsourced from local knowledge in the wiki fashion of OSM.

(Apple credits OSM and seems to have a direct pipeline from parts of OSM data maybe including features like Bike Paths, so I bring up OSM for the other reason that have you checked the OSM data looks accurate enough for your area? Correcting OSM data would be useful for our collective open data, and may indirectly make Apple Maps better in your personal situation.)

There's definitely some data not being used. For example, OSM has the names of the bike paths, but Apple Maps doesn't use them (just says "turn left onto the bike path"). It also often says "turn left onto the bike path" (every few hundred feet or so) for no reason at all.

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