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I have a modern car with a built-in satnav as well as Android Auto support, and yet I still use my TomTom 5000 - it's just better. Definitely better than crappy Google Maps, definitely better than volvo's built-in maps, and it's without any kind of comparison how much better it is than Apple Maps. You get in the car, it auto-selects the destination based on the patterns it learnt(so if you get in at 7am on a workday, it automatically selects "work" as your destination. Then around 4pm, it will select "Home". At 8pm it doesn't select anything because it has no record of you going anywhere around that time usually) - something super basic that no one has ever done.

And it has a lifetime subscription to traffic updates with a built-in SIM card that works internationally as well. Drove with it across Europe several times and it's still the best satnav you could have.

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> It's just better. Definitely better than crappy Google Maps

I struggling to see how anything could be "definitely" better than "crappy" Google Maps. To me, GMaps has made navigation about as exciting as using a door knob. It works without fail, and is so incredibly mundane, that the thought of forming a strong opinion about it makes me drowsy.

In my experience - it's just frequently wrong, to a point where I don't feel confident using it. Telling you to turn where you can't, going wrong way up one-way streets, showing you that streets connect on the map where they actually don't.......I could keep going. I keep reporting errors and they never get fixed. Like I mentioned in another comment there's a road near my work which has a no-left-turn sign but Google maps still keeps telling me to turn left there - I've been reporting that error since at least 2018 but no one cares. One of my friends lives on a new(5 years old) estate and Google still doesn't recognize his address despite many submissions to Google to fix this. Another lives in a Victorian house that hasn't moved for over a century last time I checked, yet you won't find it on Google maps - Google still insists his address is several streets over.

Maybe it's just the UK maps and it works fine elsewhere, I don't know.

It’s interesting how anecdotal people’s perspectives on Google maps navigation ends up being. Personally GMaps has never failed me (UK based) in the best part of a decade, if anything it has been consistently worryingly accurate, and everyone I know has had a similar experience. As I’ve seen others say in this thread “it just works” without fail. Due to that it’s unbelievable (to me) that others have had such an experience as yours. Do you think a fault in alphabet’s mapping processes in certain geographic areas may have caused this?

I've experienced both sides. My rough sense of it is:

If you're in a city or suburb with a Google office, it's spotless, including transit options that are often customized to the city itself.

If you're in a city or suburb without a Google office, it's reliable on roads but probably doesn't cover transit particularly well. I'm not sure if the Google vs. non-Google office is just a bias towards the kind of cities Google would put an office in as opposed to the presence of an office making a difference, but Pittsburgh is much better than Columbus or Jacksonville despite being a smaller city.

If you're in a rural area, it's much rougher. Private roads marked as public roads are the biggest thing I've noticed (presumably because aerial maps can't help much there), but also things like ATV tracks and driveways marked as roads and missing one-way indicators (i.e. routing the wrong way up a one-way street).

I think Google has some kind of presence in Amsterdam (though not a big one), but they frequently have problems. I think there are two kinds of situation that Google Maps handles poorly:

* Bicycle route. They're just terrible at it. Better now than they were some years ago (when major bike routes were completely ignored), but still not great. They still prefer to send you along car routes instead of dedicated bike routes, even when those are shorter.

* Construction work (I don't think TomTom will be any better at this, though). Sometimes they do know construction work is ongoing; for example the Piet Hein tunnel near my house is closed for more than a year, and Google is aware of this. But they also don't show routes across the Amsterdamse Brug, which is still open, and the only real alternative. So instead they send you across crazy detours all over the city. But recently I was riding to Diemen along the Amsterdam-Rijnkanaal, and it turned out that dike was closed due to construction work. Big work with signs everywhere, but Google had no idea, and because there wasn't an easy way around, I had to take a big detour that would have been a lot smaller if Google had been aware of this.

There's no google office where I live, but google maps will show detailed transit information including exactly where on its route the bus you are waiting for is.

There's an attribution saying the data is coming from the local metro provider, who has their own interface for accessing the same data, but having it in google maps is nice as it integrates well with other navigation.

So I would say it comes down more to who has partnered with google to make the data more accessible.

Maybe more anecdotal, but I have had great mileage with google maps for navigation while driving too. The government department for land information does make almost all GIS data publicly available which probably helps too.

> The government department for land information does make almost all GIS data publicly available

That’s awesome! What country is this, if you don’t mind me asking? GIS datasets are really fun to play with.

It's not just the UK. I'm in the Philadelphia Area US and Google Maps has only failed me once out in the suburbs where it didn't know a road was blocked (and that was probably just timing/lack of reporting).

I use it daily to make sure my commute doesn't have any wrecks I'll have to work around, and any time I'm going somewhere unfamiliar. It really got stress tested on our way back from Tenessee during the eclipse exodus a few years ago, routed us (and lots of cars around us lol) through all sorts of Appalachia back-roads when the main highways were clogged and got us home just fine.

FWIW I live in a newer house on a country road, told google where it was and what number it was, and it was there on the maps a few weeks later. This was in NZ.

With the incredibly large sample size of two I have to conclude it's region specific.

does it rely much on user reporting? I figured google maps was smarter than that. it would have the data to see that no one takes a left at that no-left street you mentioned.

Except that people absolutely take that left turn despite the sign - it's just a very convenient shortcut, and UK has extremely lax enforcement on the road. The chances of getting a ticket for taking an illegal turn are close to zero. So Google will have the data that a left turn is indeed possible there, because clearly - people are taking it. Me reporting the "no left turn" sign is probably treated as malicious since clearly - in real life people are taking this turn all the time.

I try to not use Google services where I can help it, but not using Google Maps to me just feels like risking screwing up my day. The fact that it's what everyone uses makes it the safe bet. They have so many users being tracked in real-time to reroute me around detours and traffic jams as soon as they happen, I don't really want to try anything else.

If I use an alternative and get stuck in traffic, I'm not gonna be thinking about how proud I am of myself for sitting in traffic in the name of sticking it to Google. I'm gonna be thinking "should have used Google Maps"

I've been using Apple Maps as my regular navigator since iOS 15.0 general release, and I've been impressed.

The audio directions are much clearer - e.g. "Go through this light, and at the next one turn right".

The integration with Siri and CarPlay is very handy - e.g. "Hey Siri, get directions to Bob's house".

And the traffic data is noticeably better in the last year.

Disclaimer: I live in suburban U.S. - I've heard less good things about AM in rural areas.

Apple Maps still can't accurately route people to my house in suburban California. They end up one block over.

Have you tired submitting an issue? No one could map to a place I used to live out in the sticks accurately but I submitted a bug/issue to Google Maps and Apple and they fixed it.

No I haven't. Will totally do that in order to save time explaining to friends why they can't use Apple Maps for navigation to my house. I just assumed that submitting maps bugs is the same /dev/null form as normal bugs for Apple software, but it seems it's a separate process and they are actually responsive. Thanks!

FWIW, I have submitted Apple Maps corrections several times in the app, and have always received notifications that my map updates were completed within 1-2 weeks.

Ranging from simple updates like hours, address corrections - to more human-oriented updates like "The end destination point is about 500 ft off from the actual location".

I believe someone really is looking at them and correcting them.

It (and all other GPS apps I've tried) work well enough, until you try to go somewhere you know well and have to turn it off to stop it from trying to reroute you over & over again.

If any app would allow me to have some sort of ability to let me set a level of "pain" (traffic, stoplights, smaller roads, extra turns) that's acceptable vs. a level of time savings, I'd use that app and never look back.

The number of times I've gone seemingly way out of the way only to rejoin a highway 30 minutes later in order to save 2 minutes total (vs the traffic I would have sat in) is way too damn high.

Google maps actually tried to kill me once. I was driving down Hwy 59, to a remote farm I'd never been to before, and for some reason Google Maps thought that there was a break in the highway. Like someone with an eraser just swiped a 1-inch stripe across the highway that was impassable.

I trusted it because I didn't really know where I was going, and it had never let me down before. So I followed its instructions down a series of little farm roads to detour around the "break". Except one of the roads crossed under a raging stream, and was only passable during the dry season. I actually fishtailed a little to stop, because the road was slightly downhill and made of dirt. If I had followed the instructions, I would have died.

Anyway, I submitted a bug report about that highway break, and 5 months later Google wrote back and said my fix had been accepted! How thrilling.

I just ignore it when it's going on and on and I'm headed to a destination I know well. Or I'll turn it off when I'm within a mile or so, I just want to use the traffic awareness to make sure I don't end up in an unexpected jam.

One slight oddity - it doesn't seem to care about which side of the street your destination is on in a lot of cases. Sure, in a suburban neighborhood, that's irrelevant. But in a city with two-way traffic on the street, it can matter quite a lot.

> until you try to go somewhere you know well and have to turn it off to stop it from trying to reroute you over & over again.

In those cases I just mute it, there's always a mute button.

>If any app would allow me to have some sort of ability to let me set a level of "pain" (traffic, stoplights, smaller roads, extra turns) that's acceptable vs. a level of time savings, I'd use that app and never look back.

In all seriousness, have you tried Waze? Gives multiple options each time you search, allowing to choose routes that are simpler, or maybe partially but not fully use tolls.

I used Waze constantly in the DC area, was a godsend. Then I moved to Seattle where apparently comparatively nobody uses it -- without a ton of users, Waze isn't much better than the rest, sadly.

I'd love a setting that would silence directions when I am within $distance of home, and have home set as my destination. I don't really need to be told to turn on my own street, or the streets I always use to get to my street.

Yeah, in Chicago at least google maps tends to go into a panic attack, it's distracting and has nearly caused me a few accidents

The short version is that Google Maps is 'free', it's not terrible, and it's better than nothing. (And often better than the integrated in-car satnav systems - although that's not so much because Maps is good as because the in-car systems are often quite bad - the Tomtom & Garmin integrated options being a notable exception).

But Maps is definitely worse than dedicated navigation devices, although it does improve over time.

There are certain things it is particularly bad at, for example routing down slow 20mph residential roads with speed bumps.

But... are the dedicated navigation devices so much better than Google Maps to justify the increased cost? Probably not for 99% of people.

I used to use a Garmin satnav, and plug it in to my laptop and use Garmin's software to do my travel expenses, full tracking of all my movements, and it's my data to do with as I wish with no concerns. I can do the same thing through Google Timeline... but it's not even close to as well executed, and gives me serious data privacy concerns... because Google.

Same, the integration and sharing and real time traffic of Google and Apple Maps are basically impossible to compete with, in areas where they are available.

Do you live in California, USA?

Google Maps is quite terrible in many parts of the world that are not-America. In Europe, it routinely suggests absolutely insane "shorcuts" because it doesn't seem to understand that even though a narrow, winding country lane with stone walls on either side may have a 90 kph speed limit, it would be suicide to actually drive at that speed.

YMMV. Google sent me to shortcuts that couldn't be called roads at least 3 times since i've been using it.

They also have a tendency to make you stick to the main - congested - roads. You won't notice unless you're a local to the area though, so let's say that's good enough.

Waze in my experience seems to have more realistic ETAs and is better at routing around traffic jams. Even though it's built on Google Maps.

However I'm in Romania and I do long weekends in mountain retreats in the middle of nowhere. As I said, YMMV.

Purpose-built tools are always superior to multi-tools for the purpose they were built.

A phone running google maps is a multi-tool.

> It works without fail

So long as you have a data connection or planned ahead with a downloaded region.

- And don't trust the routing in the actually remote areas, and prep your drive by putting GPS coordinates in your driving route -- but that's true of the competition too.

- And have a vehicle that's the size of a normal passenger car. (I used to own a special "RV GPS" that had better data on bridge heights and weight limits.)

It really depends on where you live and what you do.

One time it wanted me to walk through the waste/sewer pipes of Mallorca to go from a beach to the city center, let me tell you it's not a pedestrian path.

I just can't get on with gmaps, I stumble with the UI every time.

I've seen a marked decline in the speed and usefulness of google maps over the last 10 years or so. I'm not sure whether they are cramming too many features into it, so the UI becomes too cumbersome from it's original use case, or that they are having issues with data quality, but I find needing to retype different searches more often, and just interacting with the UI more to get the same information (which in my case is almost always "find the nearest X" and then "plan a route from where I am to X".)

I remember how many years it refused to save route preferences like "avoid tolls" or "avoid highways". You would have to set them anew for each route search.

Does it work without fail when you drive out of range of mobile reception?

If it has planned the route while within service, it actually does. It guided me from Vegas to Yosemite (via Lee Vining and the Tioga Pass) without trouble despite several areas of no service. It had registered the waypoints and knew where it was, even if I couldn't load any additional map data. (I had not saved the area for offline use.)

Yes as long as I've downloaded offline maps which I always do when I leave the bay area.

Tom Tom used to charge for map updates, which became a no-go for many. The same thing thing with built-in ones. Toyota asked 60 euro for the map updates and unfortunately no android/ios auto.. i am going between google maps / apple maps. I find routes better in google maps but i love apple maps voice indications better. I still have also a free lifetime update tomtom but it very slow to add destination etc.

> Tom Tom used to charge for map updates, which became a no-go for many.

There was also an instance when they unceremoniously stopped supporting updates on “old” devices that were not actually that old and were in fact still actively being sold in stores (in the UK at least). I know people who switched to alternatives (the smartphone option in all cases IIRC) and vowed they'd never pay for another TomTom device again after that.

So I'm not sure what device you have in mind, but the one I mentioned(GO5000) still receives regular and free map updates despite being 12 years old now.

It was a fair few devices, including some that has been sold as getting lifetime updates (one of those sketchy instances where the lifetime in question is the lifetime of the product and they define the end of that by stopping the lifetime updates): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/42859546.amp

To be fair, perhaps more fair than is deserved IMO, the devices still did (probably still do) get qgps updates so function normally apart from having outdated maps and can, somewhat disingenuously, be said to be still be getting their lifetime updates.

I seem to recall that a map refresh would be similarly priced to just buying a new one. The device was probably sold as a loss leader. Back then the devices were super nice, I recall thinking, but the business model doesn’t make any sense now, to me. They did have products specific for huge trucks, such as route planning, maybe it makes sense for those use cases still?

They quoted me $350 Australian/year for yearly map updates last year. I was hoping they would've humbled a bit in 10 years.

How do you know that $350 isn't the reasonable price on their side of it?

It's likely going to be a niche market even if they give the updates away for free (because people will mostly use maps on other devices).

Well, you can get a base-model tomtom for AU$179 [1]

And the customer's alternatives include "just use year-old maps" and "use google maps" so it's not like tomtom have the customer over a barrel here.

[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/Updates-Lifetime-Smartphone-Messag...

Right, but the customer doesn't have TomTom over a barrel either. If producing maps for older devices doesn't net a lot of customers, they either charge quite a bit or don't bother.

The device you link wouldn't net updated maps of Australia. Looks like world map devices are closer to $400.

> Tom Tom used to charge for map updates, which became a no-go for many.

This is what led to their demise, no?

No; their demise was the rise of smartphones who can do pretty much everything they can, for free. GPS navigation was commoditized as part of the smartphone arms race.

What do you mean no? You're saying the same thing, you just added a step to explain why the alternatives were cheaper (free).

No, it was not a price point only problem.

That's not at all what I am saying? Tomtom's updates were very expensive though. A smartphone with non-free map alternatives won't get you there so it's not the smartphone either. Both developments were necessary, either one on their own isn't sufficient.

I would say so (that and the smartphone as ppl points out) - they announced subscription service around 2009-2011 from what I can see online and we can see the interest falling drastically since:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=tomtom

.. that's also when I stopped using them I think, and what's interesting is that once you get into the habit of using a new map+navigation service it seems quite hard to switch or is that just me? (I want to try Apple because I like them more than Google but I'm just so used to Google Maps)

> once you get into the habit of using a new map+navigation service it seems quite hard to switch or is that just me?

I don't think it's just you. :) I know a fair number of iOS users who switched to the standalone Google Maps app during the, shall we say, rocky first year of Apple Maps, and who I've never been able to convince to look back -- and these are people who live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Apple Maps is arguably at its best.

Silicon Valley - "It's Apple Maps bad"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq1wgIN62E

Give Apple Maps a shot in an area you know well. In my experience, GMaps is better in terms of knowing what's around you and the traffic - but AMaps gives much more easily-followed directions and doesn't do silly routes to save five seconds' time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582257

DonHopkins 5 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automati...

I worked at TomTom in Amsterdam from 2007-2009, and had a fun time and learned a lot working with some smart people at a great company that treated us well and had good leadership.

But TomTom was just on the cusp of a small company turning into a big company.

And the savings and loan crisis was about to cause the economy to collapse.

Then TomTom got into a bidding war with Garmin over Tele Atlas.

So they ended up borrowing a whole lot of money at a really bad time.

Just as the iPhone was hitting the market, and Google and Apple were rolling out free maps and turn-by-turn navigation on smart phones that everybody already had.

I wrote about that earlier in the discussion about Etak:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747015

DonHopkins on Feb 27, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Who Needs GPS? The Story of Etak's 1985 Car Naviga...

"Etak eventually became a part of TomTom, ensuring that its map data, some of which was first digitized back during the Navigator's development in 1984, would live on to this day."

The story of how TomTom and not Garmin ended up owning the data originally digitized at Etak is interesting. At the time, there were only two digital map companies: Tele Atlas (from which TomTom got their map data) and Navteq (from which Garmin got their map data).

From Wikipedia [1]:

"On July 23, 2007, a €2 billion offer for the company by navigation system maker TomTom was accepted by the Tele Atlas board. This was then trumped by a €2.3 billion offer from United States-based rival Garmin on October 31, 2007 initiating a bidding war for Tele Atlas. TomTom responded by upping their bid to €2.9 billion, an offer which was again approved by the board of Tele Atlas. Garmin had been expected to counterbid once again: with Tele Atlas' main global rival Navteq subject to a takeover bid from Nokia, the company had stated that it did not wish both companies to fall into the hands of rivals. However, after striking a content agreement with Navteq through the year 2015, Garmin withdrew its takeover offer, clearing the way for TomTom. On December 4, 2007, TomTom shareholders approved the takeover. The European Commissioner for Competition cleared the takeover in May 2008, and it closed in June."

TomTom (where I worked at the time) was shocked and dismayed that Garmin outbid them by €300 million on Tele Atlas, because while it made a lot of sense for TomTom to buy their own map data supplier, it would have been prohibitively complex and expensive for Garmin, who used Navteq data, to switch map data sources and retool their entire map data digestion, distribution and error correction pipelines.

TomTom was so determined to buy Tele Atlas and keep it out of Garmin's hands, that they raised their bid by €900 million.

In the meantime, Garmin renegotiated their deal with Navteq, so they didn't have to pay as much for the data, and didn't have to switch map suppliers.

The stunt that Garmin pulled off was, in my opinion, an ingenious head-fake that cost TomTom an enormous amount of money, almost a billion euros, and at the same time saved Garmin a whole lot of money by enabling them to renegotiate a better deal with Navteq, who was faced with losing their major customer if they didn't lower their prices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tele_Atlas

That's definitely why I stopped using TomTom. Like gambiting, I really liked their product. They were compact, fast and the UX was great. But Google Maps is free.

> But Google Maps is free.

We need a new alternative word for "free" when it comes to advertising companies. Something short to say "the cost is too abstract and indirect to understand fully or describe, but does impact society at large". Maybe "free-ish"?

That is all already assumed by the word free, if one understands it, which most do not.

Nothing is truly free as people commonly conceptualizer it in their mind. Just alone receiving something at all comes with strings, even if they are not apparent. There is a term that describes this issue rather well in German, “vogelfrei”. It refers to being as free as a bird, which is assumed to be a great thing, but it also means you are free to be hunted and predated.

Free is also the theme of a deal with the devil. I will self-censor here a bit about what is the devil, because the devil’s censorship is more consequential than if I do it to myself for the time being.

Google Maps is "free" in the same way healthcare is "free" in many countries. The usage of the word seems fine.

Closer to free-to-air TV.

There is no free lunch. Its more like you expect some idealized absolutism in market economy from people who need to eat and pay their mortgages. Its uncommon to meet an adult with such expectations, its mostly reserved for children up to certain age.

> It’s uncommon to meet an adult with such expectations

I don’t think this is an accurate assumption. Many adults probably have a nagging feeling about this version of free, I doubt most of us can accurately describe the cost (and most wouldn’t care to try).

I mean it really does “feel” free in that the costs are so abstract and externalized. In fact I’d argue that it has completely changed our perspective on pricing, value, and entitlement.

Anyways, total tangent to the main topic.

Hear, hear! One suggestion: costs a drop of blood.

More like a pound of flesh.

"Costless" or "zero-payment".

Man, I remember in the mid 2000's when the Toyota dealer said like $600 to update my mom's Sienna's GPS.

Google maps with Android Auto does auto-learn popular/regular destinations and suggests them at appropriate times. It works pretty well.

Apple Maps as well, but I have no idea why I would need directions to work from home ...

Traffic and accidents might push you into different routes, especially if you have major decision points like which route you take around some geographic feature. When I drive in Los Angeles decades back even people who’d been driving there for ages wanted traffic reports to pick between roughly equivalent freeways because almost inevitably one of them would have much worse congestion due to an accident and you could save 20+ minutes.

Distances in LA aren't measured in miles, they're measured in time -- and the distance between two points changes based on time of day, direction, and events like sportsball or presidential visits.

Knowing where to switch between freeways and surface streets, and what route to take in what conditions, can cut half off the driving time.

Some examples of varying conditions from my personal history, even with optimal routing:

Commute to work: 22 minutes. Commute home: 1h 16min.

Go visit a friend: 45 minutes. Come back home at night: 16 minutes.

> Knowing where to switch between freeways and surface streets, and what route to take in what conditions, can cut half off the driving time.

Yes - I remember as a kid learning how to read maps and noticing my dad's face when I was like "These cities are only 10 miles apart. Why does it take an hour to get to grandfather's?".

The surface streets are an especially interesting blindspot a lot of drivers have. There was a period around the turn of the century where I was commuting between Santa Ana and Garden Grove and freeway traffic was generally manageable early in the morning but on the trip home it was often better to cruise down the surface streets where the lights were timed around 20mph than to sit in stop-and-go traffic on 405 or 55/5.

Get out of here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCer2e0t8r8

Driving in the London suburbs, I know how to get most places I want to go. In fact I usually know several different routes that are roughly similar in travel time. Google maps is excellent for telling me which one of those routes is least congested right now. So I'm not really using it for navigation, but for congestion information. It very rarely suggests a route I don't know, but I use it all the time anyway.

Although the route is (more or less) fixed and static, the amount of traffic isn't, so it could be useful to be re-routed to avoid congestion.

You’ve clearly not enjoyed the benefits of progress yet where you are. Don’t worry, I’m sure it will reach you eventually. It is progress after all.

> auto-learn

There is a gate right behind me that is closed with chains. It isn't possible to drive through there, though you can walk in and out from the smaller gate.

Google still always tells me to drive through the gate. I don't think Google Maps auto-learns. Maybe it needs a bigger sample size so people don't abuse it?

If you use the reporting interface they seem to update promptly. There’s a major road near us where Google used to tell people to make a illegal left turn across 4 lanes of traffic, which was common enough that I used to see it almost every time I went by for years. Once I found the well-hidden reporting UI, that stopped two weeks later.

There is a no-left-turn street near my work, and Google maps keeps telling me to turn left there. I've been reporting it every now and then since at least 2018 and it does nothing.

Yeah, don't ask me to defend Google on any customer service topic. I automatically believe any lapse you report.

Does it? I have never seen it do it. Maybe it's only region-specific?

I believe it does when you set your home and work addresses

It learns other patterns, too (which is kinda creepy). On Thursdays, I like to swing past a local taco shop on my way home after work and when I plug my phone into CarPlay, it prompts me navigation to the taco shop; it doesn't do this on any other day.

Kinda a neat feature, but it makes you wonder what else it is learning.

apple maps do the same and also works quite well. I miss it in my tesla.

The Tesla maps do it too, when you tap on the navigation address entry there's a list of 'Suggested' which is learned based on time of day / day of week.

Thanks. Then I learned something new today.

Strange, I have this feature in mine.

Very tangentially related, on the front of "stupidly useful features that nobody seems to think seriously about": The fantastic Citymapper app shows a HUGE "Get Me Home" button if you open it past 3am. Just brilliant.

Apple Maps has the feature you just described, and their maps either are TomTom or are better than TomTom.

I don't know, here in UK they just seem to be barren, with major roads still missing, they don't know about "no right/left turn" signs in places, they don't know about one-way streets......it's not a good system.

I don't know how it can be using TomTom's data if TomTom doesn't have any of the same issues.

That one’s the “new map data” so it’s all original or government sources.

Maybe they got tired of mapping the millionth quaint village named something like Branstonpickle-upon-Trousers.

There's definitely a passable road in my neighborhood of Baltimore that Apple Maps doesn't know about, and always tries to route us around until we turn onto it.

> with major roads still missing

I really struggle to believe that. Major roads missing from Apple Maps? Can you give any examples?

> if you get in at 7am on a workday, it automatically selects "work" as your destination. Then around 4pm, it will select "Home".

OK, but you need GPS navigation and maps to get between "work" and "home"?

Traffic awareness, I'd guess. I use Google just for that whenever I'm away from home (which is a small city, I don't have to go far, and I know all the alternate routes if one is busy). I already know how to get to 90% of the places I'm going in some cities, but they're the easy-to-remember routes, not necessarily the fastest ones.

Presumably they have a dense network of roads in-between, where the optimal route can change daily.

I may be mistaken, but I think all those features, plus traffic data, are built in both Google and Apple Maps as well.

Also, phones generally have larger and brighter screens, and more accurate GPS. I don’t see the advantage of TomTom here.

Problem is, for me at least, Google is useless for predictions or recommendations. Search is still better than DDG, but way worse than peak Google.

Their recommendations are all over the place despite the fact that I have been logged in permanently in some form or another since GMail where still invite only.

No one else except my wife and my parents know more about me (and to be perfectly clear they know different subsets of me) but yet Google still insist on showing me the most irrelevant and annoying ads and suggest I call people at work in the middle of the night etc etc.

It sounds like you have issues with the search engine, not maps.

It is not just in the search engine, Google Now AI keeps pushing mostly nonsense.

The most annoying thing is they had this nailed. Google Desktop Search had some bonus features like the feed sidebar that automatically predicted what I wanted to read more of based on what I had read before and it was crazy good.

Search used to be amazing and these days I feel it is barely better than DDG.

Still nothing to do with maps, though.

> ou get in the car, it auto-selects the destination based on the patterns it learnt(so if you get in at 7am on a workday, it automatically selects "work" as your destination. Then around 4pm, it will select "Home". At 8pm it doesn't select anything because it has no record of you going anywhere around that time usually) - something super basic that no one has ever done.

This is exactly how Apple Maps works, for me. It suggests a destination based on my patterns.

The auto-nav feature is very nice. However others do this, Apple Maps, at least, will suggest a destination based on behavioural patterns.

Tesla also have a "simple" version of this, if you are at home, it will automatically to go to work in the "morning", and in the afternoon it will automatically go "home" if you are at the office. But this seems to be location/time based, and not behavioural.

> Tesla also have a "simple" version of this, if you are at home, it will automatically to go to work in the "morning", and in the afternoon it will automatically go "home" if you are at the office.

Yes, and this feature drove me crazy until I figured out how to turn it off. The two places I know how to get to are to work every morning, and home from work every afternoon! It's the _other_ places that need navigation.

It also has learnt destinations based on when you go there, they appear under 'Suggestions'.

My car has in built (TomTom) sat nav too with a nice wide-screen display. The tom tom maps make full use of the screen and very legible.

Android auto gets forced into this like 4:3 resolution in the middle of the screen which sucks and I can't find a way to fix it, even after looking in developer settings.

People have said it's the car manufacturers fault, I really don't understand why it has to be this way though

Waze does this "trip suggestion" feature, works pretty much as you describe it

Since Covid, I don't go anywhere consistently enough for it to know what to suggest :)

https://support.google.com/waze/answer/9747181?hl=en

Waze had this auto learning feature as well. It is agressieve in rerouting but I feel it has hit the sweet spot between saving time and the extra hassle of getting off the highway.

So, does what google maps does, but can it route you around an accident? Does it show speed traps? Does it show you closed roads? Why is it better?

I definitely miss TomTomGo on the iPhone - it definitely routed me around more traffic jams than google does.

> it auto-selects the destination based on the patterns it learnt

Apple Maps does this too

> something super basic that no one has ever done

Errr all maps apps do this.

It's also important how they're doing this. GMaps in my car constantly fails to show anything useful (or even start navigation) because there's no signal in my underground garage.

Such a simple thing and yet TomTom can do it and Google can't.

My car's built-in navigation can use dead reckoning based on steering angle and wheel speed, so is still better than TomTom in this respect. I really think this person who is clinging to their old TomTom is a bit oblivious to what all the alternatives now do and how they do it better.

I don't know if I'm oblivious - on long drives I usually have the TomTom setup and Waze on the android auto screen - TomTom knows about traffic and issues on the road that are just not on Waze, most of the time. Also Waze keeps directing me on most idiotic side little roads, recently I nearly got stuck in a muddy road somewhere in the British countryside because of Waze because I decided to trust it. Again, no such problem with TomTom.

waze acts as if it treats all roads as wide, level, straight paths, and expects ppl to speed on them bc it sends me on twisty, steep, narrow 25mph roads with low visibility so they canxt be sped on.

Mhm - note that with "TomTom" I now mean Android app (which has Android Auto integration) and not an old standalone device :)

I've also seen that same very app as a builtin navigation with all the features (including live traffic) in a new Fiat 500e, so it seems like they're licensing the tech to car manufacturers.

That is an edge case that Google could but does not seemingly accommodate, but very well could. It’s likely not just that you have no GPS, it’s also likely that you have no mobile or Wi-Fi signal reception, both of which could inform on your location, if implemented.

That being said, why do you need your navigation to start while in your garage? Just start it before you enter your garage or right as you drive out of it if you want to benefit from GMaps benefits.

You can download maps offline in Google Maps

Despite having my area downloaded in Google Maps, the navigation and recommended routes won't load in my garage. It usually fails horribly (mostly because, like many poorly programmed mobile apps, it doesn't handle scenarios with poor connectivity well).

I've had some pretty poor experiences with offline maps on Google Maps. There have been a few times where I've made a point to download the maps for an area a couple of days ahead of time because I knew service would be spotty. I would then drive out to the areas with spotty connectivity, and more often than not Google Maps would refuse to generate a route for a route definitely within the confines of the selected offline map. I'd have to drive back a bit by memory to find reception and then try to generate the route again. This would even happen if I was on a route, cancelled it for some reason, and then attempted to restart the exact same route while along the route it was just on.

Google Maps offline has been extremely unreliable for me and mostly unreliable when I had the greatest need for it. This was true years ago and this was true less than a month ago.

If I'm going to someplace with spotty connectivity, I make sure to put in all the main addresses and locations on my car's navigation system ahead of time. The maps might be dated but at least it'll generate a route somewhat towards the destination, even if I might need to take a detour along the way.

You can only download them in explicitly specified chunks (not e.g. one whole state, much less whole country), and they expire if you don't update them regularly.

Technically you can download a particular region as well. e.g. search for "Belgium", click on the ... > Download offline map.

However, it still downloads an arbitrary rectangle, and there is still the same maximum size; it just automatically centers it on what you selected and gives it a reasonable name.

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