Google Maps keeps getting worse
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I would be what is considered a Google Maps Power User for the last 10+ years, everything from user to developer.
Just last month, I finally had enough and downloaded Open Street Maps. Not because it's "better" overall (i.e. obviously Gmaps is more polished, smoother, cleaner interface, satellite tiles, etc), but because it's better in the way that a normal person would want to use a "map". Emphasis on "map", not an advertising board.
For example, I was trying to find the name of a very prominent river in Alaska, and no amount of zooming in, panning, clicking, or tilting in Gmaps revealed the name. I followed the river from start to finish, thinking it would display the name eventually, with no luck. Same for a prominent mountain. Similar results happen for things like street names, labels, anything that is not the nearest McDonalds or the 17 Starbucks that are in the viewport (that I'm clearly not looking for or interested in, based on either my searches or my clicks).
It's getting to the point where Google Maps should be renamed Google Billboard, because it is having less and less in common with a map.
- Car navigation through Carplay that includes traffic data.
- Finding businesses i.e. restaurants, shops, services quickly.
I'm not loving GMaps lately buy tbh it does work as expected in those scenarios.
I've tried using HERE Maps and I loved the offline maps and navigation. However the business and point-of-interest search was pretty terrible. I had to basically use Google every time to find the address of the place I was going to and then enter that address into HERE.
However, regarding restaurants. There is no solution for the lack of ratings/reviews.
When walking from place to place in cities, I like to memorize the entire path so I can actually look around on my walk as opposed to having my face buried in the phone. But Google Maps made it almost impossible to identify the names of at least half the streets I would try to know (so I know what streets to turn into, etc). Looking at the text directions doesn’t help because my memorization requires me to have a mental image of the path, and correlating the text directions with the maps image is way too time consuming.
Now, this actual use case might be rare. But the idea that a map cannot be used to identify street names in large European cities is just terrible. And for comparison, I’ve done this for over a decade and I don’t remember this ever being a problem before say 2017-2018 even though I was visiting far smaller cities over that period.
In the Organic Maps-app, in osmAnd and in MagicEarth long tapping on a place returns the nearest street name or address.
Adding a "if user lives in $city then he probably won't stay in a hotel in $city" would have a positive impact in all Google Maps users, but the measurable impact is likely too small to make a difference in a Staff Engineer's Perf so it's deprioritised under another new set of check-in notifications.
Even if I don't want to travel to that place, I don't mind a somewhat irrelevant result for a resort. Trying to hustle me into registering for that hotel with the localized currency of my current geotargetted location doesn't make sense. I don't bank in 3rd world units and the resort isn't in that location either.
Totally irrelevant, but try changing that setting in under 15 minutes. I haven't found a way.
I might have made an impulse buy. Instead I was annoyed by terrible UX.
I only recently discovered ... or the penny dropped why various issues I'd been having in regard to being listed in a neighbouring suburb. I had bounced against the decline in google map information and accuracy for the last 10 years or so. In that same time most delivery services have stopped doing to the door deliveries out in my rural area because they use google maps, those that persist to try a to the door delivery and don't use a local driver in my area, usually waste a couple of hours driving up and down the road ignoring the road markers and preferring what their device is telling them.
Sure I could make an account, hand over more private data and fix my own issue, but so many addresses I've looked up via google in my area are not right. I now tell services to use apple maps which seem to be on the money and ditch their google since it seems to be waiting for half the population to make accounts to sort out their address.
Nowadays, I try to not update until we can't use something anymore, because most of the time updates are for useless new UI designs that you did not ask for, updating telemetry/spy features, and limiting features or adding new ways to nag you for money for features that you used to have.