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Comment by victor106 | Hacker News Reader

I was a little hesitant to switch to Apple Maps but after I did, I cannot go back to using Google Maps.

Everything from the UX to the clarity indicating street names is far superior on Apple Maps.

One thing I always hater about Google Maps is that it doesn’t show you street names when you need them. I was in NYC a while back and I wanted to see the street name and I had to do lot of scrolling to find it.

I also wish Apple has better metadata about businesses, sometimes it shows a restaurant as closed when it’s actually open or vice versa.

Overall I am glad i switched to Apple Maps

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Not only street names, but business names too.

Sometimes I’ll zoom in to max zoom to a particular building where I know some business/restaurant is at (for example to check opening hours), and gmaps shows an empty rectangle.

The only way to get it to show what I was looking for is to search for it in the search box, and then it magically appears in the rectangle that was completely empty a moment before.

You can also contribute to Apple Maps. Be the change you want to see

You can't easily contribute to Apple Maps or add places. That's why Google Maps has much more content. Many people would love to contribute to Apple Maps, but aren't allowed.

On the other hand, these are the two wealthiest companies in all of human history. Why can't they hire people all over the world to improve their maps?

>You can't easily contribute to Apple Maps or add places

yes you can, you simply select an item on the map and report a problem. also they already hire third party agencies to add data to the map

Compare that with Google Maps, where anybody can easily add businesses or other places of interest that are missing from the map. How do you go about doing that in Apple Maps? Without an Apple device?

There was mention on HN of people using this feature to add spam.

Businesses should have in their best interest to add themselves to Apple Maps (which they can do). If you see something not showing just pop inside and tell the manager. That's what I did one time at a hairdresser's

Business owners spend their time and effort where it pays off. If they don't have spare time to navigate Apple's user-hostile backend for adding or updating their business, they won't. The network effect means customers will rely on Google Maps.

Apple has a web portal for adding businesses to a map. https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-business-connect/intro... Existing businesses can have inaccurate information reported on and corrected by users.

Business Connect is sadly a total joke. I can't correct the name of a business I manage and just get the error "Thoroughfare or fullThoroughfare must not be empty, Thoroughfare or fullThoroughfare must not be empty"

Google Maps is far better for businesses to manage and get their information out. That's why their maps are dominating.

Apple Maps pulls in OpenStreetMaps data in my area of the country, so submitting information on OSM means an eventual Apple Maps upgrade for me. I edited the 3D shape of some of the houses in my neighborhood and added missing streets on OSM and saw them imported into Apple Maps a few months later.

Here is a map to see where people affiliated with apple are contributing to openstreetmap: https://piebro.github.io/openstreetmap-statistics/#e19b it seems they use OSM data everywhere but in North America and most of Europe.

Apple Maps also credits TomTom as a data source, so could it be OSM > TomTom > Apple in terms of the data flow?

Accorinding to wikipedia they have many different sources (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maps#Features):

> The main provider of map data is TomTom, but data is also supplied by Automotive Navigation Data, Getchee, Hexagon AB, IGN, Increment P, Intermap Technologies, LeadDog, MDA Information Systems, OpenStreetMap, and Waze.

uhhh street view

Apple does have a "street view" of sorts in areas where they have driven vehicles around the area, but it's limited now to only some cities. https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/look-around-places-ip... It is possible to use Google's data through Apple Maps via a third-party app. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/streets-street-view-browser/id...

Google Maps does feature particularly terrible [carto]graphic design... never understood why they got away so long with such poor feature colour, contrast, and placenames appearance logic.

the street name thing is super irritating when I run into it.

Agreed. Is it so hard to render the street names most relevant to your route? It seems to always render the most important names last as you zoom in, when they should be first.

I wonder if its a cultural thing. In my area of Not-California, roads will often have a local municipal name, but also be a county highway. For a while, navigation was unaware of this and would tell you "turn on highway 48" while driving downtown. As a driver, you go "wtf is highway 48". YIou have to zoom all the way in on the map to see that its Bank Street. Now it usually says "Bank Street", but will only display the 48 on the map. Very frustrating.

no, it will just not be labeled. So you need to scroll around along the street until you find a part with the label on it.

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