Google Maps has become an eyesore | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps has become an eyesore

fastcompany.com

782 pointsnkurz680 comments

I worked on Google Maps monetization, and then on Maps itself.

Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad.

If you don't believe that, that's fine. "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Google consciously does not want to estimate that, because such a document could be discovered in patent litigation. As it is, there are tons of patent lawsuits about Maps, and the damage claims always tried to get at Ads revenue, because Maps revenue was nil.

Caveat: I could be way out of date here. I've been retired a while now.

As for the UX: "enshittification" and big-company bureaucracy describe it pretty well.

I personally think that ads on maps were a bad idea even for monetization. At glance, this seems to be a plausible ads inventory for local businesses but in reality this doesn't scale very well compared to Search or App ads (or even Display) since most of ads will be limited to a very narrow area so big advertisers don't feel as strongly as other channels. They could design ad campaigns specific to local areas but this increases overall complexity and makes it really hard to plan and optimize its budgets. Also, it's worth mentioning the difficulty of measuring offline conversions accurately... Some degree of automation might help, but at this state it's not really a great place for advertisers.

I hate ads as much as the next guy, but I actually think that if this were better implemented, it wouldn't be that bad.

One way I commonly use google maps is as a restaurant or bar finder. Like "show me open restaurants around me". I even do this when at home and feel like eating out for whatever reason. I don't want to walk too far away or take transit. I just want to see the restaurants in a 10-minute walk radius around where I am which are open and what they serve. Now, sure, I'd like to see all restaurants, not just those which took out ads. But I'd be fine with those being featured at the top of the list.

Instead, what I get, is ads for hotels down the street when I'm already home. Or ads for a carpet store chain, which was closed that particular day (national holiday), which you also can't really miss if you set foot in the square.

Regarding monetization, they could probably figure a way to tell that if I click on the restaurant's pin, then follow directions there and stop at the address, I'm likely dining there.

I do something similar when going around and about in the UK (and to a lesser degree Malta when I happen to be there). I like to visit random places, seeking out locations off the touristy paths. One particular search has helped me over the years: "pubs near me".

Local pubs, even those part of a large chain, tend to give a nice feel of the region and the people who live there. And you can learn interesting details about the local history.

The author notes that Google does seem to be leaning in to the sector where they really make a lot of sense, hotels. I'm going to Delhi for work next week and how I picked a hotel was going to maps, zooming out from the venue a bit, and letting hotel pins appear.

> What about indirect revenue?

Google decision makers must know of its importance as a moat, a data collection pipe, a vehicle for other services and so on.

No offense, but trying to squeeze direct revenue out seems kinda laughable. Or maybe even a way to plausibly deny the indirect revenue importance.

with giant data beast company like google, everything is about indirect revenue. Just because map doesn't make money, doesn't mean it won't drive up other ad revues.

Google uses maps to collect the location data from iOS devices. So, Apple Maps are useful, because they prevent Google Maps from becoming "too many ads app".

Also duckduckgo has apple maps online too:

https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=maps&ia=web&iaxm=maps

Just noticed it recently.

I recently watched this show on netflix called "The Billion Dollar Code" that went into the details about maps beginnings and other companies claim to the idea. It was pretty interesting.

I can also recommend "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality" (https://amzn.com/0062673041) about the evolution of Google Earth, Maps, and Street View. Written by one of the founders of Keyhole (the company that built what became Google Earth), the book is mostly about the founding of Keyhole and its mapping technology, but has some insider info about the political maneuverings between Google's Search and Geo teams over owning the map ads because everyone knew it would be a big deal.

That link gave me "SORRY we couldn't find that page", but this worked:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062673041

That was about Google Earth, not about Google Maps, right?

(I don't know to what extent the tech stack is shared between the two.)

Ah you're probably right! I know they are separate things but ever since that update ~10 years ago where they brought many Earth features into Maps the product merged into one for me.

Thanks, I'm annoyed that Netflix never recommended this to me, even though I've watched many tech documentaries.

Brilliant show, though it is about Google Earth. Made me uninstall Google Earth from my phone though, the picture it paints of Google and their legal people is not pretty.

The main reason degoogled android doesn’t work is because of the (terrible) design of the android location services and maps APIs.

I’m not sure who that drives revenue for, though.

I switched back to iPhone over this. I strongly prefer Here We Go to Apple Maps, and it is available on Android.

(Open platform, my ass…)

Been trying to use GrapheneOS for a while with their Google Play Services location services shim and it does seem to be fully dependent on GPS.

Google play services API's are deliberately designed to be hard to reimplement by third parties. In the case of maps, the placeId of every business or POI is internal to Google, and no other provider can give you a map for a matching placeId.

It's no accident.

This isn't unique to Google. For example, the stripe PaymentMethod object is opaque and can't be moved to any other payment provider. That pretty much locks customers into stripe unless you want to force the customer to sign up to your service and enter their billing details again.

You can export card information to another provider: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan...

If google can't make money with maps, why isn't Maps taken out of google into a charity/non-profit backed thing. There's OpenStreetMap, and Wikipedia wouldn't mind having a Map I guess.

That way it'd help a bit with the monopoly heat and maintaining it could be slightly cheaper. I don't know the legal stuff, but I'd rather have a company supporting a non-profit than burning money internally, so I hope the incentives follow that (yeah, probably not true thanks to lobby and having rich people run governments)

＞ What about indirect revenue

This part is probably what keeps Maps valuable as an asset, and it's such a huge moat that letting it go would be irreversible. Building a similar product from scratch takes tremendous capital and local deals, we've seen how much of an effort it is for Apple to even have a viable product, coming up with a competitive offering would require double that.

Even if all counted for Maps was net 0 in the balance sheet, I feel there would be no Google CEO agreeing to let it go just for antitrust relief. They'd probably let Youtube become independant before that.

> If google can't make money with maps, why isn't map taken out of google into a charity/non-profit backed thing. There's OpenStreetMap, and Wikipedia wouldn't mind having a Map I guess.

Assuming maps still loses a good chunk of money, how would it survive as a charity or non-profit? Where would the money come from? Who would donate to the charity?

Without donations OpenStreetMap would also lose money. But obviously people (and companies) are much more willing to donate to a project when it's a charity/non-profit, instead of the product of one of the biggest companies in the world.

Maybe people are more willing to donate to a non-profit, but I am not so sure the same goes for companies. Today companies have to pay a license fee if they are using Google maps in their services. A non-profit can of course continue with licensing the service, but if they make that optional, 99% of the companies would stop paying.

I donate to OSM (both money and data). I would never in a million years donate to Google. They don't need my support.

It takes serious funding to make an excellent mapping app that contains worldwide business info, and a whole hell of a lot of paid review staff. A non-profit/charity can't really tackle this well. And since having a good mapping app is so important to the use of a smartphone generally, it makes sense for the two major smartphone OS vendors to each have a platform-standard mapping app.

I'm pretty sure you could use AI these days, to replicate the accuracy of Google Anything.

And there isn't a paid review staff, people who filter maybe, but Google doesn't review anything.

Every single point here is wrong.

Mapping is a data collection/sanitization and content moderation problem. You need a lot of data, much of it user-submitted, and you have a lot of bad actors constantly trying to feed in bad data. I don't see where AI comes in here except maybe for route optimization, which is a tiny percentage of what a mapping app actually does. A mapping app is mostly just a huge database of incredibly useful info that needs to be true (and LLMs cannot help there, they just make shit up).

So you already can use OpenStreetMap, but don't? Presumable because Google Maps is better? So maybe the answer is that "we" don't make Maps a non-profit majority of people (me and, apparently, you included) actually prefer superior ad-supported product?

But is Maps actually a net loss for Google, or are they using Hollywood-style accounting techniques to make it <i>appear</i> unprofitable as an additional disincentive to the lawsuits that AlbertCory mentioned?

It's a massive net loss for Google, where do you think there revenue there would come from? A few API users don't pay for a massive amount of people working on keeping the map data up to date.

> are they using Hollywood-style accounting techniques

there's no need. Whereas individual movies do need a fake P&L, Google doesn't report Maps P&L at all. AFAIK.

Even if people wanted to do this for some reason, it is practically extremely difficult to extract a codebase from google3.

I'm surprised by that given the api pricing.

It's also been downright unusable. While navigating it hides all the business names from me so I can't browse the stores are along my way. I constantly have to exit navigation, approximately remember the route, browse the stores, and then re-enter navigation mode. This is only one of many pain points.

Its assistant is also useless.

"OK Google, zoom in the map by a factor of 1.5"

"OK Google, stop hiding the businesses"

"OK Google, add a stop for the last Safeway before the turn onto route 120"

None of this stuff works.

Yes the classic dance of “zoom in slightly further, but this time without arbitrarily removing 3/4’s of my search results that I know exist here, and showing me other random locations”

Or “good lord just show me the street name please”

I’d like to see a defence of the reason why it’s so often a bit of a job to be able to read the street name… on a map. If only for the laugh I would have.

They have a blog post about it from way back. Essentially the map changes depending on context so you don't need to see store names if you are zooming down the freeway by the side of it, you might see road names if walking and navigating, but not if you have gps in a car, you might see more restaurants if you came to maps from a restaurant search context etc etc

Yes, Maps does it what it thinks the average mook wants, and refuses to do what the actual user wants.

My personal hot take on this is that this is emblematic of present day design strategy: first, abdicate responsibility for meaningful customizability (meaningful = anything but maybe aesthetic theming). “UI is hard.” Once you’ve accepted that it would be impossible to create settings that would be useful and worthwhile, then you just make a bunch of static choices based on what you think the average dummy would want, or write an algorithm to decide it all non-deterministically, which gives a small chance that it will occasionally meet needs more complex than the most basic use case.

Without a trace of irony: thank you for explaining to me why I fucking hate Google Maps.

Don't change the context and try to outsmart me without giving me any indication of doing so. Don't attempt to outsmart me without giving any recourse if I don't like it. It only ever leads to information I want to see being hidden. You, Google Maps, do not know what I want better than I fucking well do.

Exactly. Like for example if I'm the passenger and I do want to see the store names along the intended route, and even the ratings and reviews, while the driver is zooming down the freeway to make a decision about where to eat, without taking it off navigation mode.

Oh and not to mention that it sometimes tries to translate street names to my phone's language setting. Leave street names in their original language so I can match it up to the physical signs, goddamnit.

Because Google always wants to have its cake and eat it too. Every one of their product tries to be "smart", and it inevitably miserably fails. Google Maps tries to both be a normal map, and then a list of events and places around you, then a shopping guide, then... then it fails at all of these.

Letting you specify on Google Maps a kind of context that would swap between these at will would be an infinitely better experience, but unfortunately it doesn't grant promotions, unlike a blog post about the _brand new smart experience_

The article complains about 'clutter' - but have you seen a traditional printed map like [1] ? Personally I find them beautiful, but it's a rather Jackson-Pollock-esque beauty.

One of the changes brought about by the digital mapping revolution was to allow much less visually complex maps.

[1] https://blog.az.co.uk/z-map-company-supplies-london-emergenc...

That's a bit offputting at a glance but I was quickly confident I could find the street name of any street I was in within a second.

Right but digital map allows you to zoom in and on street level of zoom there is no longer name clutter. There is no need to remove those details to just leave swathes of empty space

You can click the search icon while in navigation mode, to search along the route. It doesn’t work that great as you have to zoom to an aprox area and it seems somewhat arbitrary what comes up. It will show you how many minutes of detour a location would add, which is quite nice when choosing among a bunch

Sometimes I don't know what I'm searching for, I just want to browse what kind of businesses exist in an area along my route to see if it's worth stopping there and taking a break. Also if I use the search feature it auto-zooms out the map and then I have to fight it within hundreds of milliseconds to get back to where I was on the map. Once it auto-zooms fully I may have trouble remembering where exactly along the route I was looking. I may have been searching for food near a particular weirdly-shaped lake along the route that I spent 15 minutes tracing the 500km route at max zoom to find. Once the search auto-zooms back out, my 15 minutes of "work" is instantly wasted and I can't find that lake again.

Well, first world problems for sure. Its free app, you have some extremely specific use-case (even though I have no doubt 100 HN users can post in response that they do exactly same thing, its still fringe overall) and the app doesn't suit that narrow situation that well...

Not surprised, we can come up with probably thousands of similar scenarios when some popular free tool ain't the smoothest to use for 'when I do this but want also that and while doing something else that isn't so well integrated into the flow something happens/doesn't happen but should' situation.

Maybe take a laptop and a mouse next time, 100x more efficient to use. Or use it in browser in tabs, so you can have 20 different locations/views and switch between them.

The search-along-route is more of a 'search-around-my-current position'. If you e.g. need fuel, it lists options for busy towns in the wrong direction rather than the easiest path along your current route. If you need a given RON or niche fuel, you just have to memorise which suppliers sell it & hope that it shows up in the list. The utopian vision that it could figure out the range of the car it's connected to and use this information to decide where would be most efficient to fill up is a pipe dream.

Using Maps while driving for anything other than A-B navigation is generally poor. It seems designed by people who are accustomed to every destination having plentiful dedicated parking. If you want to go to B, then find local parking, you need to invoke dark voodoo.

The worst part is that the Apple & Google duopoly in maps supported by Android Auto and Apple Carplay means there's no way for a superior alternative to succeed in the market. Google even contributed to this by buying Waze. So Maps only needs to be just good enough.

>The worst part is that the Apple & Google duopoly in maps supported by Android Auto and Apple Carplay means there's no way for a superior alternative to succeed in the market.

What does Android Auto and Apple Carplay have to do with it? Aren't both of them available for third party apps to use?

The Apple one is available, theoretically, though you have to specify each time to tell Siri to get directions with something other than Apple, and it also won’t support any features such as the useful “share ETA” which is a real shame. They also thankfully opened up their split-screen mode to third party navigation apps a couple years ago (though, incidentally, that screen is utter trash in my humble opinion because of what it doesn’t include).

Or that for some reason zooming in works differently in the search screen. Instead of zooming where I'm pinching it just always zooms in the middle.

What kills me is I'd easily pay 50~100 eur a month if Maps had to be non ad subsidized.

This is to me Google's most everyday impacting product, and what makes the difference between me being stranded/lost or making it in time. The stories of people ending in a lake for blindly following directions are cheeky, but decent maps are just that important, and Google Maps, how flawed it can be, is currently the best for so many areas.

You'd pay 50-100 euro a month ? Why ? How did you arrive at this number ? Even before google maps, the standalone navigation devices didn't cost that much. To stretch this, if maps is 50-100 a month, how much is the total bill of all software you use ? Surely, the h/w, OS, browsers etc. should be orders of magnitude more than what they are today too.

> How did you arrive at this number ?

Straight comparison to the other service I paid for for a while I gave up as it didn't seem worth it.

> Even before google maps, the standalone navigation devices didn't cost that much.

They costed a bunch and were a lot less useable in day to day life.

There was no device that would tell me the schedule of the next train departing from the station 10 min from where I am, when the store I am going will close, and how I'll get back when there's no train left for the day anymore. To your point there were service providing this info in part, in text format, on super small screen, and they'd cost around 5/10 bucks a month.

Now I get that with a mostly accurate map, end to end, automatically udpated as I start moving. And I also get other people's position, and don't need to text them every 5 min to know if they're lost or stuck.

The same thing goes for mountain maps, where I live the trail markers are relatively accurate and I can use it as a reference to check the official maps and on trail directions (and getting the other people's position is that much more valuable)

All in all it's a package that was never at hand before smarphones arised, and is currently only really working with Google Maps, even as we have OSM and Apple Maps at the distance.

> how much is the total bill of all software you use ? Surely, the h/w, OS, browsers etc. should be orders of magnitude more than what they are today too.

I actually think that keeping a worldwide map including cities street level details and natural paths up to date could cost a lot more that maintaining a browser or an OS.

> There was no device that would tell me a) the schedule of the next train departing from the station 10 min from where I am, b) when the store I am going will close, and c) how I'll get back when there's no train left for the day anymore. To your point there were service providing this info in part, in text format, on super small screen, and they'd cost around 5/10 bucks a month.

There is a free Android (+ iOS) app doing a) and c), it's Transit App, at least in 18 countries and 300 cities [0]. Gives you schedules and (multimodal) trip planning including car, bus, transit, train, subway, cycling, walking, rideshare, bikeshare, scooter rental. It has both scheduled and (near-)realtime information, detours, service interruptions etc. Shows you all the options you're interested in, rolled up by start time and total time, and includes cost(/estimated cost for rideshare).

In text format, on a super small screen, free.

> And I also get other people's position, and don't need to text them every 5 min to know if they're lost or stuck.

Well ok but very few people use that much. Why do you need it so much? Socializing? Hiking? Playing Pokemon?

[0]: https://transitapp.com/region

Transit looks like a nice app. I assume it's based on the open data initiatives in places where it works (France etc.). There's similar iniatives in many places now (Japan has one as well) and I'm pretty much rooting for more of those.

You're still left patchworking all these apps, switching from one another at every point and assembling everything in notes by yourself. It's super nice it can be done at all, but I'd also pay for an app that has it all in one place if it wasn't free.

To note, the c) part is not just public transport but anything from private bus network/taxi/private bike networks/just walk. While Maps deals with that decently, I'd agree it would be way too much too ask from a free transit app.

Transit App works fantastic in urban US, Canada, Western Europe, Aus, NZ. (It's also great when visiting a new location for discovering which routes get you from A to B, speed/frequencey/cost, as opposed to commuters who already know which mode, route and stop they want, and primarily want real-time updates, ETAs. Obviously you can supplement it with the local transit app/website.)

There's not much patchworking/assembling once you bookmark your preferred locations, research what times they open/close, select favorite transit modes, bookmark specific lines, research which exact stops. Don't mentally lock into Google Maps as your primary thing.

I said the c) part is already done by Transit App and generally better than Google Maps (shows rideshare time-and-cost estimates, bikeshare/scooter pickup locations etc.) Where 'taxi' has generally been replaced by rideshare and by 'private bike networks' you mean bikeshare. Not sure if by 'private bus network' you mean coaches, or employee shuttles, but those are sometimes not open to the public. (Can you cite us an example location and name the private network companies?)

As mentioned, the amount of local detail depends on how much your municipality participates in open-date initatives; if it doesn't, ask them to. Transit App is adding new regions constantly.

> And I also get other people's position, and don't need to text them every 5 min to know if they're lost or stuck.

Are you running a package delivery service, or taxi service? I don't understand this statement in other contexts.

I'm not the commenter you're replying to, but Google Maps was the sole reason I changed from a feature phone to a smart phone. For people who travel a lot, it's hard to compare life before and after digital maps. They are extremely useful.

100 Euros per month for Maps? What do you even need Maps for when you can just see everything from your flying yacht anyway?

That’s a stretch but I agree id pay 50 bucks a month for a total Google Subscription: gmail google maps docs and drive. All of it. No ads, personalized only to serve me. And bring back reader and I’ll pay 100.

Just use Feedly. It's great and free, or $6/mo if you want to support the business.

The only case I can think of where google is the best is traffic updates. I use OSM primarily, osmand particularly for navigation, and I've tried going back to google a few times, every time I try it it's worse than the last time.

You may be willing to pay €50 a month for it, but most people can't afford that and wouldn't pay it.

Google Maps has its pitfalls, but it's by far the most up to date in the cities I've used it.

OSM lacks a lot of details that completely change how you'd move from point A to point B (I was missing overpass bridges and crossable paths in residential neighboorhoods), and point to point navigation is also not great. Then it completely lacks all the more commercial features Google has built on top of Maps (store details, position sharing, timeline etc.)

On sheer readability I also prefer Google Maps, but I've been using it so long that that might be just familiarity.

I wish I'd like OSM a lot more, but every time I ended up back to Maps for a reason or another.

For countryside locations and topographic, OTOH, Google Maps (and Apple Maps) is a joke compared to OSM, though, at least in Europe.

Yes. On the more critical part when in the middle of nowhere I often use a traditional map as reference after getting my rough position through Google Maps. I wouldn't trust any of the mapping services more than the local entities to provide accurate trail info, especially as they're the own maintaining the paths.

Sadly I'm still not good with really basic compass and map positionning, and the GPS + average location info helped a ton in the past.

Depends on what you are looking for and what country you are in. When it comes to small 'unofficial' roads, bike paths and hiking trails then OSM is much better. When it comes to finding the location of rural buildings, addresses and companies I find Google Maps much much better and complete, at least here in Sweden.

> On sheer readability I also prefer Google Maps, but I've been using it so long that that might be just familiarity.

Interesting – personally I find Maps absolutely horrible for usage as an actual map for orienting myself (as opposed to just serving as a vague geographical background for displaying POIs or navigation information).

When you zoom out, it often doesn't really distinguish between forests and other open spaces (admittedly OSM's coverage in that regard varies regionally, though at least in Europe it seems quite comprehensive and definitively better than Google's).

Then, when you zoom in everything just turns into a featureless grey-on-grey with no distinction between built-up areas and everything else (only "parks" get shown, but e.g. in France that apparently even covers large scale "natural parks" covering hundreds or even thousands of square kilometres, so in that case everything, including any towns happening to lie in that area, just gets shown with a green background, which is equally useless), and buildings are only shown when you start zooming in really closely.

Yes, there is a lot to improve. I also have my gripes about what POI are kept from the detail view to the zoomed out view, or how I'll completely lose a location if I happen to misclick on some random POI that happens to fall under my finger on the edge of the screen.

On the rougher part of the maps, I often get back to satellite view and/or StreeView if available (even as they sometimes don't show the same info as they come from different points in time -_-;). It's a handy backup that I don't get on the open source map apps

> even as they sometimes don't show the same info as they come from different points in time

And for unfathomable reasons Google Earth (the desktop version) can show historic aerial imagery, but no historic street view pictures, whereas Google Maps works just the other way round – you can view historic street view photographs there, but no historic aerial/satellite imagery. (And the browser version of Google Earth apparently can't do either.)

I'm curious if that's US vs Europe thing?

For me in Europe, Google Maps coverage quality can be best described by this personal anecdote. I used to live in Nürnberg, which is in top 10 German cities by population, and where are some major and well-recognized international companies are headquartered. Nürnberg has a subway system (U-Bahn) since 1980s, and it's significant enough: a few dozen stations over three lines (one is fully driverless, btw).

Google didn't have any representation of U-Banh in Nürnberg till at least 2017. I don't mean "wasn't supporting it in navigation and routing", I mean " stations weren't even marked and labelled on the general overview maps. And it's not like they didn't have the into: there was a widely-used user layer which added at least station labels. They just simply didn't care enough, and had other priorities.

In the meanwhile, the level of detail on OSM covered details as minor as every mailbox not only in Nürnberg, but in every small town around Frankonia (I used to participate in postcrossing and used this a lot from random places).

As a counter argument, here in Sweden I've yet to run into a place where Google maps has failed me when it comes to driving, public transport or address/POI search. OSM on the other hand is missing half the buildings once you get more then 15 km out from major city centers and even in major cities, things like house numbers and addresses is often wrong. The only scenario OSM is better than Google Maps is pedestrian and hiking routes.

Here in Poland it's fine. Maybe that's due to the war Germans waged on google street view ? I'd think some of that was also used for mapping

France and Spain had a pretty good coverage, Japan cities are decent as well. I've only seen Munchen and Kolhn's most touristic areas but there were decent enough we didn't hit any critical issue. Commerce data and opening hours was abysmal on the other hand.

OSM was pretty good too in France but has different issues: they don't get the same access to up to date commerce data as exposed through local aggregators, and there's just not enough user data to have good heuristics on navigation times.

I don't know about "most" but many people can pay 50 Euros per month for a service they care about. The problem here is that very few people would pay a monthly fee for a maps service that was free for almost 20 years.

50 eur a month is insanity. I bet that i and all the other 'poors' like me would start buying $5 permanent paper maps and asking for directions again. That's the kind of hemorrhagic price that only someone who never thinks about the cost of groceries or gas could pay. I'm not trying to tell you that you're a rich asshole or anything, but i do want to communicate that those numbers are vastly detached from the reality of most people. I'd pay 50 eur one time but monthly is a lot. Just pin me to the version i paid for, don't update road closures or any of that other bullshit and let me opt out of the parasitic subscription pricing.

I get your point of view, and I think it comes down to how much you rely on the service

As you mention gas, for instance my gas cost are ridiculously low (less than 10 bucks a month) as the car is only for specific cases, and 99% of the time I'm not driving.

Same way I care a lot more about visiting new places than going to theaters, and I'd never end up with 5$ of paper maps (to dig my own grave, I also buy paper maps of the wilder areas I go and they sure cost way more than that...)

On the other had, getting lost somewhere I have no familiarity with, being stuck at a station that has an incident and not having any backup plans, looking for someone in a town for 30 min because they're describing places in a way that is too vague are situations that are highly stressful and can cost a lot more than 10 or 20 bucks. Have you ever missed the last train and thought how much it will cost you to do something about it ?

That's where I put the price of an app I actually use a ton, it could be one of the main reasons I have a smartphone and not a combination of a dumb modem and a tablet.

What kind of comment is this? You act like the commenter has insulted you personally, just because they appreciate the service and would pay a lot of money for it. You even go as far as calling the other person an asshole, in a weaselly way. Each one of us have different means and put different value on things. People pay €50 to do a bungee jump.

I assume people on the Google Maps team use Google Maps in their daily lives. Do they not feel the UX friction from all the ad-centric design?

It's more likely they use Apple Maps

People who make decisions usually don't use the product. Just look at Uber CEO, who was clueless about Uber ride pricing.

All the VPs and directors use iPhones.

But still loaded with Google products, especially Maps.

How can google maps monetize when openstreetmaps exists?

Interesting to know that OSM lists businesses, but GMaps contains more information, which can sometimes be crucial. (E.g. opening days and hours.)

Those details are even occasionally correct

OpenStreetMap does hold opening hours of businesses. Here are the details (including opening hours) of my local cafe https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/485163917 I go round entering OSM data using the StreetComplete app. It's slightly awkward if a shop doesn't display their opening hours, because then you have to go in, and I feel I need to buy something and then ask their opening hours.

I do that too (in Germany), and I just… ask them if I may enter their opening hours into OSM. I've never been refused. Sometimes an employee takes an interest and then I take the chance to explain a bit. It's a win-win for both sides, after all—the map users and the shop owners.

Why ask the owner in the first place. Its public information anyway. Google does not ask either.

Because I'm nice that way.

Sure.

But for mapping lots of POIs this is a PITA and doesnt scale. What if the owner declines? This is non-copyrightable info anyway.

Shall one ask house owners if one can map their address or their house' outline?

Hopefully a few of them will realize it is easy and so start updating their own information as it changes. Everyone wins - their customers get up to date information and so come when they are open.

In a practical way (instead of just, why not be polite?), the information for permanently displaying to the public may be different than the information relevant to you at a single moment.

If you just ask it without context, "today we'll close at 16:00" is a perfectly reasonable response.

This is funny. You are giving the business free labor, yet you feel you owe the business.

OSM can't show (and plan for) traffic, for one.

> OSM can't show (and plan for) traffic, for one.

Unfortunately there's nothing to aggregate current traffic information (traffic jams etc.) as far as I know.

The maps themselves support all sorts of routing options for walking/bikes/cars, at least: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing#End_users:_routi...

They also have a Wiki page on public transport: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport

Sadly, they don't even attempt to have public transport schedules on the main maps, whereas Google has even added inter-city buses in some places, as well as having an integration with Bolt or other platforms I think.

That, in addition to the lack of business information, business hours, reviews and so on makes OSM a bit inadequate in comparison, which is unfortunate. There have been other maps that build on top of OSM data (which is great), but they're still pretty small in comparison.

It would be interesting to see how OSM would fare if it actually tried to compete with Google: 1st party Android/iOS map with some open dataset for business information, integration with some review platform, aggregated public transport maps with an underlying open dataset and stuffing their pockets as much as possible with money from Bolt/Uber/whatever to ensure longevity of the platform, by adding helpful suggestions for trip routing, as well as aggregating traffic data.

> Sadly, they don't even attempt to have public transport schedules on the main maps, whereas Google has even added inter-city buses in some places

What Google is doing is to integrate public transport data (often in GTFS format). It is not mapped directly by Google, and unlikely that it would be doable in OSM (note that in many cities timetables change weekly, for example as result of construction).

There is some ongoing work to build similar things for OSM-using software, for example Organic Maps is at least trying: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues?q=is%3Aiss... (I bet that pull requests would be welcome, especially if discussed with people developing it)

Just a couple weeks ago, Google announced they're going to re-photograph Street View in my country, though, which is still running on the initial 2007ish data. How would that be profitable? The idea of virtual ads placed onto pseudo 3D walls was already present when Street View started but apparently didn't deliver economically. Maybe they want to break resistance this time around as they had lots of data protection complaints/requests for blocking a particular lot from displaying unblurred at my place?

Are you talking about Germany? Google never stopped creating new images in Germany, they've just decided they would put the new images online (which they already did).

Mind that they don't only take pictures. The cars are full of sensors. From GPS to verify coordinates of roads, over Wifi to scan SSIDs for locating devices without GPS to LIDAR to scan 3D features and probably a lot more ...

And all the pictures have things like street signs and traffic lights and fire hydrants which people have been helping locate with recaptchas.

I think this a myth told by marketing.

They already know the photos have the objects they are interested in. Are they still working on motorcycles buses and signs?

The recaptcha part doesn't even depend on recognition, it's just a statistical comparison with what other humans clicked on given the same prompt + some pointer analysis and browser fingerprinting.

>Monetization was a dismal failure.

Aren't they charging big money for the API?

Depends. Basically, the API is free if all you do is display a map, keep the Google branding at the bottom, and add a few of those pins.

Make one of those pins move because it's actually a car, and suddenly your cheeks are getting clapped with 6+-figure bills.

I don't think this is true for a while (5 years). There are view limits and I still find embedded maps that look just like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50977913/google-maps-sho... .

Currently working on multiple apps hitting anywhere between 5k and 150k maps loads a day, costs are zero because we do not do things outside of the free usage tier. The Maps Embed API (the one you see on websites) is pretty clear on that: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/embed/usage...

    Pricing for the Maps Embed API
    All Maps Embed API requests are available at no charge with unlimited usage.

    Other usage limits
    There are no short-term (queries per second) or long-term (queries per day) limits on the Maps Embed API.

Similar things apply to the Maps SDK for Android. Seeing the watermark means that there's either no API key being sent with the request or, in relatively new developments, that you haven't enabled billing/inputted a credit card. Which is a scary thing to do when you know that you're not doing anything out of the usage limits... but what if Google suddenly decided that ?

This. I'm paying for maps API as have sites that display it on pages + the directions requests.

Some sites we added it as an image to avoid this. Some sites got flagged as weren't allowed to do this and others have been ignored.

I wrote a system that incorporates Google Maps.

It’s an open-source system that is used worldwide, by a few thousand loosely-organized nonprofits.

When Google Maps suddenly required associated credit cards, it caused a great deal of trouble. It still causes problems.

That’s because most of these entities are not 501(c)(3) orgs, with bank accounts and debit/credit cards. In fact, the organization enforces deliberate poverty, amongst its chapters.

Someone needs to add their personal card to the Google Maps API. Since the maintenance people are constantly rotating, this is an issue.

Also, the API has a dashboard like a Space Shuttle cockpit. Most regular schlubs have a difficult time with it.

We use google maps for our non profit event and for the first time this year we had a small charge for our once a year event. We have the same credit card issue even though we’re a 501c3.

Google’s UI is a complete mystery to anyone outside google that doesn’t know the lingo. It seems to keep changing too.

> Someone needs to add their personal card to the Google Maps API. Since the maintenance people are constantly rotating, this is an issue.

I’d be terrified of a situation like AWS, where suddenly my card is charged thousands of dollars for some unexpected situation.

And, unlike AWS, I wouldn’t expect to be able to reach someone at Google to cancel the charge.

> In fact, the organization enforces deliberate poverty, amongst its chapters.

You mean a cult. This isn't a real issue for properly run 501c3, it's a tax registration for a reason.

> You mean a cult.

Well, isn't that special?

Have a great day!

False. The API has a free tier, followed by 200$ monthly credit, followed by outrageous prices.

Peole forget that millions of people submit data to Google Maps for free. I placed all the local postboxes on google maps, people sibmit information about their businesss, opening hours, etc. This is hugely valuable.

Also google grew laxy. Not tskes them a year to add a royal mail postbox

Worth adding that information to open street maps so that it available for other maps too.

For sure, but for many people there's only Google Maps, and maybe Apple Maps. On the short term, catering to Google Maps makes sense. They'd add to another project if it were to be popular enough, and the network effect keeps Google Maps popular. Hence they get away with enshittification.

>They'd add to another project if it were to be popular enough, and the network effect keeps Google Maps popular. Hence they get away with enshittification.

Ah yes, the chicken and egg logic of network effect excuses all.

How about if people, idk, just evangelized more about the things they love to be smug about on HN?

People should be shamed off enshittified platforms. Be "that guy" - or be a hypocrite. For Google it might a little more complicated, but for each one of us it's exactly this simple.

That's just another reason why it's worth adding that information to open street maps, if you are able to.

Compare the experience of adding stuff to OSM and to Google Maps. Much easier.

OSM is for nerds. Very hard to add even basic info. Google Maps it’s trivial.

Same as uploading photo to Google Maps is easier than adding it to WikiMedia Commons. Such is life.

(Ironically one of the biggest sources of photos is commons is Panoramio; before Google merged it with Google Maps, the photos there defaulted to Creative Commons.)

How do I update stuff in Google Maps? For OSM, its a case of opening Street Complete and tapping on things.

To add new features I have to use SCEE, which is more nerdy mainly because it involves using FDroid to install it. But I've no idea how to add, say a park bench to Google Maps.

Just tried it now and I found the experience incredibly easy:

On desktop, right click on the map and choose "Add a missing place." On mobile, long-press to drop a pin, then scroll down to "Add a missing place."

Does OSM require installing a parallel app store to add a park bench? Sounds like a UX-killer :/

Just tried it on mobile and that is nice and easy, especially if you want to add a business. Not sure how you add a bench that way as I couldn't see the option, but I might be looking in the wrong place.

You're right though, installing another app store is a non starter.

Good point -- I'm not sure if Google Maps tracks benches. (I'd guess it doesn't, but not positive.)

OSM should be scraping Google maps.

Legally how?

OSM has a two-way data sharing agreements directly with (among others) Apple and Bing/Microsoft. Additionally, the "Overture Foundation" with members including AWS/Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and TomTom have a complicated indirect two-way data sharing agreement with OSM. (Overture Maps are a "curated" subset of OSM data and members are encouraged but not required to make contributions and updates to the maps directly upstream to OSM.)

Google probably sees their data as a moat and likely aren't interested in two-way data sharing. (Given how many of their competitors are now involved directly or indirectly with OSM or Overture, they may be correct.) OSM probably can't legally scrape it without an agreement in place.

Also, everybody by default shares their location when using it, no? So they get live feedback on traffic relatively for free (till some lawsuit will ban it). I can see it often changing and recalculating as I drive, albeit with some lag.

I don't think you can estimate overall worth of Maps to Google directly and easily. Its still #1 driving solution I use, its not perfect in dense traffic in cities but otherwise OK and for free, plus their estimates are pretty accurate.

iPhone and android phones share your location with apple and google constantly regardless of if you’re in maps or not.

Google does not need maps to have traffic data.

Agreed. And not just that, but also the fact that people use Google Maps for car navigation means Google can derive the location of traffic jams by comparing current speed with the speed limit.

This is hugely useful for navigation since it means these bottlenecks can be avoided, some thing which is not possible unless this data is available.

If I present you the other side of the coin - we are a small country, where we cant keep up with number of cars of tourists traveling to the next country over summer.

Since the Google Maps is here, not only we have a completely congested highways but also all other roads that were free of tourists before are now blocked. Tourists that are traveling to the next country while their number has doubled as they dont stand in line from border to border but rather destroy any viable traffic for locals.

In some locations it has gone to the point where small villages with historically very narrow roads are literally blocked by **** (pardon my french), using google maps and see that there is a pass (while every road is the same, right) so the police needs to deter tourists to even head there. Wont even go into suffering of locals there.

This is a real issue, but it has nothing to do with Google specifically. You’re basically saying that information on road networks should be obscured or restricted so governments can indirectly control the flow of traffic.

Japan actually has some soft regulations in this space about routing and road visibility (e.g. residential roads are hidden when you’re on thoroughfares). But they’re just suggestions so only domestic companies follow them and Google, Apple, etc still provide their usual global algorithms.

Maybe there’s a good solution to this, but I don’t think it’s getting rid of mapping services and going back to security through obscurity.

No, I am saying that by diverting drivers to regional roads without taking into account local population, this is directly Google fault. Why? Before Google started messing with information about congestion, there was no issue. Regional roads swallowed without any problem those few adventurous tourists that decided to use them. Now you find an average Joe everywhere.

Wanna se another interesting example (use google translate), here are statistics of our volunteer based and taxes paid (for everyone in need, even tourists, including helicopter transport) mountain rescue service: https://www.grzs.si/resevanje/statistika-nesrec/

Check number of accidents since 2006 (google maps came out 2005) and constant rise to 2023 (more than twice the number of interventions). Freaking maps are showing the steepest mountain roads (Alps are not a joke), to parts without phone signal. Google gets you just far enough to get you into troubles, potentially fatal troubles.

The solution sounds simple. Force non-locals to buy a Swiss-like vignette to drive on those roads. And, make it damn expensive, like 1000 Euros. You can probably put a police checkpoint around a corner about 500 meters after the sign and fine people who are missing the vignette something like 2000 Euros. Finally, use social media and obnoxious free media (City AM and friends) to tell everyone about it. It should take care of itself in about 3 months.

You cant charge locals differently than other member states citizens in EU.

I wonder if it would be possible to get a bunch of old phones and put them by the side of the road with Google maps on, simulating a traffic jam. Or something like that.

Edit:

https://www.wired.com/story/99-phones-fake-google-maps-traff...

Somebody did it.

> this is directly Google fault. > Check number of accidents since 2006

I believe it is a funnel of things: Slovenia became part of EU. GPS navigation in cars and smartphones became a thing. Google isn't even the only traffic data provider. Slovenia has RDS-TMC since 2009. So even a boring TomTom will show some form of congestion info.

But I agree with you, that navigation tools should not direct traffic away from the main roads (especial transit roads). Traffic planners should somehow be able to weight streets or routes.

The solution is simple although cumbersome, disallow cars though The village.

Google maps doesn't do this, it's done by lower levels of software, specifically Google Location Service which is built into Google Play Services. You can tinker with maps settings all you want, but the data is coming from the rootkit they bundle on nearly all devices. Many android apps use GLS APIs and won't work without it.

That may be the case on Android, but I have an iPhone that runs Google Maps.

I've been saved from tickets by Google maps several times now, mostly because when it warns of a speed trap it reminds me to look at the speedometer and realize the prevailing traffic speed had been more than 10 km over the limit.

Google Maps design is becoming less detailed over the years. It's really apparent when compared to OSM. It is necessary to search for a lot of things in Google maps as they are otherwise not visible. You can't really navigate off Google maps without turn-by-turn navigation. I wonder whether this is a strategic drive from Google to make maps more like search to enable advertising or whether they truly think this is the superior user interface.

What is your take on that?

Yeah it's weird, very often a venue on a street is simply not visible unless zoomed in TO THE MAX. And then it's not any weird obscure thing, it's a restaurant or coffeeshop that's been there for years.

What's even worse is that often I'll click "restaurants", zoom in all the way, and then click "Search this area", yet Google will still refuse to show some popular restaurant, even when there are no other restaurants displayed in the window.

The only way to get those restaurants to show up is to search them by name.

Not sure if they're intentionally penalizing certain restaurants, but it's pretty bad.

Guess those ones just aren't paying their google taxes...

I get much better results by clicking on the text input field and pressing enter every time after moving/zooming instead of clicking on "search this area".

FWIW Apple does the same thing to me in my neighborhood. I live in Brooklyn where there are restaurants on every block but it'll zoom out and show ~15 restaurants scattered over a mile with half in Manhattan. Pretty unusable.

Have you found anything better for the area? This frustrates me too...

OpenStreetMap has at least some of the data: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/40.67540/-73.95641

so an interface could be made to present it better: without being zoomed in so much, with filters and so on.

I know of https://www.toiletmap.org.uk/ which does this for public toilets.

I just found this which has an example for restaurants in one town: http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/where-to-eat-in-middlebu...

I love OSM and use it all the time for hiking, but even though their restaurant and hotel listings have good coverage, they're sadly not much use to me without the reviews.

Short of scraping reviews from Google and importing them into OSM for the area in which I'm traveling, I'm not sure there is a good short-term solution.

I don't think that they understand how people in NYC and Chicago live. It is designed for people who are driving everywhere.

Also the "cuisine" filters for restaurants appears to be completely irrelevant. You will still get results for Chinese restaurants even though you have selected "Pizza".

It would seem that the revenue-optimizing ML has learned that the median user could really go for Chinese take-out right about now (for all values of now), no matter what sort of food they started out looking for, so it's always going to show up.

I know median and mediocrity already share a common root, but I wish there were a clever portmanteau describing ML-optimizing for the median user leading to a mediocre experience. "Medianocre" just sounds like an eggcorn, so I presume 99% of readers would take it as a mistake instead of a neologism.

Been noticing this, myself. E.g. for a local used bookstore that's reasonably popular and has been there for decades. I know the owner and can guess -- though I haven't asked -- that they aren't giving Google much if any money.

So, no Maps presence for you! (Except via direct search within Maps.) Just my anecdotal experience, but one of several similar on Maps that leave me thinking they "have that feel" to them.

I really hate when I click search this area and it zooms out to a larger area.

I specifically had an area selected for a reason. I know there are plenty of restaurants there. I don't need it to tell me to look somewhere else.

There was some articles on here about how maps have been changing over the years (also other map apps). The gist is that why would you need to show street names anymore? On printed maps that's the only thing you have, but that's not how most people navigate anymore. They search for a place or POIs and then use navigation.

So the things most people care about have changed, streets are less important now and things like attractions or "active areas" are more important. Yeah, some people still read maps the "old way", but now probably those are in the minority so catering to them isn't worth it anymore.

Of course that's only one aspect next to the question of what makes the most ad money.

It's process lock-in applied to the real world. Sad.

I think you mean this blog? https://www.justinobeirne.com/ , it's been shared a number of times https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=justinobeirne.com here with this one being the most popular https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653 , though that's six years old. Still well worth reading

> They search for a place or POIs and then use navigation.

In big cities, there is construction happening everywhere, POIs have closed down or changed location after the pandemic.

Street names are the only thing that stays the same.

Perhaps not a large use case, but I use street names regularly when discussing bicycle routes. "How to get from Town A to Town B by bicycle" often relies on street names - take Rt 123 for 2 miles, turn left on Fancy Farm Lane, etc. The route-finding often keeps you on Rt 123 for the whole route, but it's a busy dual carriageway and really not suitable for bikes.

I think a big problem is that Maps' bicycle routing would prefer to send you down a 55mph 4-lane street with a "sharrow" in the right lane, because that's a "bike friendly street", instead of the 25mph quiet residential street that parallels it.

Unlike a physical map, we can't go back and access old google maps, so those changing preferences in style leave a memory hole.

If you haven't read 1984, this is really confusing, but a "memory hole" is a hole into which you place something you don't want to have any memory of, destroying it forever. The ironic name is an example of "doublethink."

I believe you mean "Doublespeak" rather than "Doublethink".

No, “doublethink” is the term introduced in Orwell’s 1984.

And those who've actually read it also know that Newspeak is also a term he coined and that since we don't actually have newspeak, the natural extrapolation of the term Doublethink into a spoken application is the term Doublespeak.... Right?

On the flipside digital maps can progressively show layers on user demand. You can pull up the OSM map with all the street names. If you've got a bit of patience to learn tools like QGIS (or ArcGIS) you have more power than ever to build personal maps that work best for how you personally navigate spaces beyond the lowest-common denominator that used to be print maps.

It's maybe a bit of a shame that the raw tools (like OSM, QGIS, ArcGIS, even what is left of Google Earth) aren't easy to learn and equally accessible to everyone and the incentives of the big maps (Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc) is its own drive to a different lowest common denominator, but digital maps have such tools in the first place. (It was far more expensive to get custom printed maps. AAA triptychs are interesting thing to compare here.)

I don't think the issue is digital maps, just that the data is not accessible or preserved.

I've sometimes noticed friends navigating (on foot) in a residential area staring at their phone until the blue dot is on the turn they need to make.

I would usually look at the map briefly, see "we need Farm Lane, should be 4th on the right" and then look at the street name signs. In a non-residential area I'll often do this on foot, but if I'm cycling I'm more likely to think "Right after the paint shop" or similar.

You need street names as I see the name on a map on iPhone plan in my head a route and see the street name so as to know where I turn - or how far you are along a road. GPS is not that accurate.

There were always people who were like that it's just that it was harder with paper maps, at least that's my view.

For those old enough, just think back to all the times your "navigator" wouldn't just tell you the street name or even "turn at the third intersection after this one " and instead waited until just moments before you reached it and said "Here" like a jack hole.

> The gist is that why would you need to show street names anymore?

I need the street names. They're authoritative. Landmarks (or, worse, businesses used as landmarks) are things that are occasionally useful to me in the right circumstance, but they're too dynamic to really rely on.

If a map application doesn't make it easy to know the street names, then it's one that isn't useful to me.

I'm not sure why they could add "personalities" or "modes" like simple, tourist, night-life, etc. Seems rather obvious to just about anyone who thinks more than 30 seconds about it

Implemented in OsmAnd, called profiles :)

Yea it's got some really odd behaviors that I can only attribute to Yelp style behavior from Google.

I was literally on the same block as a restaurant and it wouldn't show in maps at all, though the other 3 restaurants on the block were, and the only way to get it to show up was to Google it then click on the maps link. As soon as I took focus off the restaurant it disappeared again.

I can only presume it's because they hadn't paid Google or were being punished for some reason. It lead to me looking for more examples and found many places, including some major ones in the city I'm visiting, were excluded for no apparent reason, even ones with 4.9 ratings, and the only correlation between them was that they either were inherently more "indy" than the rest and thus likely to avoid engaging in certain aspects of Google or were close to a more powerful competitor.

This was particularly shocking when Wendy's wasn't being shown at a strip mall but the Burger King was....

If it’s not making money anyway it’s strange they pull tricks that are just another thing to make Google look greedy and bad, where they very clearly hide businesses to punish them for not taking out an ad.

It makes Google look like the mob and everyone sees it. Everyone would understand if they would show businesses that pay at the top of the list but somehow instead they went this way, incomprehensible.

> "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Google consciously does not want to estimate that, because such a document could be discovered in patent litigation.

Could you tell us more how you came to this conclusion? Did someone high up ever literally tell you "we're not doing that because it could show up in discovery"? And if not, why have you concluded that?

Given your firsthand experience and the industry's evolving nature, do you think there have been any significant shifts in Google Maps' monetization approach since your time working on it?

It's funny Maps has become so crap that I paid 10 euro for OSM.

But I think open street maps has a killer feature that Google doesn't have: the community.

It's not a killer feature if you only use it because Google got crappy.

Except of course that Google can just freely use the OSM data anyway.

Maybe. They have (or have as of 10 years ago when I signed up) a checkmark for I consider this public domain. If you don't check that OSM cannot freely use the data. I only edit OSM so that people can find my house, so I consider it a feature that google can freely use my changes, but not everyone agrees.

I know, because they tried to sell it to me when I was at a megacorp, they resell the real time location and local data correlated to user characteristics, as data service to large discrete customers. This includes constant real time information about where people are traveling to, businesses being frequented by demographics, with a sophisticated query interface for asking relatively complex questions of maps derived data. It has some differential privacy layers but we suspected it could be attacked to suss out individuals with sufficient care and effort. Our impression was “holy shit that’s creepy” and it convinced us to never put our sensitive workloads or data in any Google product, cloud or other.

Anywhere you put your data can be read by the people that run the place, regardless of what other products they make.

It seems like the person you're responding to has a problem with them selling their data in real-time to 3rd parties, rather than just any Google employee knowing where they are heading.

Yes that’s the specific issue. We didn’t fear specifically they could read our data; the key management systems available appeared sufficient at some level (although the gcp audit system had some issues, particularly access audit is available as a IAM decision log rather than point of use, so any access bypassing IAM or that failed in the service but succeeded in an IAM call would appear a positive access, etc - aws does the right thing here). More of concern is they appeared more than happy to harvest utilization information for the profit of others, and in our business that was a potentially serious side channel.

surely google employees can't look up peoples locations..

Surely they can. Who would be locking them out? Another google employee. So the useful questions are which google employees can look up people's locations, and through what process?

Some people need to be able to do that as part of their job. Either directly for some good reason, or indirectly (they are a DB admin). The question is what controls they have to ensure only those people can look such things up and that they don't abuse those rights.

I can't speak for now, but you have to apply for access. For PII it goes to a VP.

De-anonymizing a Gaia ID is about as secure as it gets.

Disclosure: this is 6 year old info. YMMV.

that's completely different. Can an accountant or marketing person look up a persons location vs can any developer vs can any map developer vs specific people with proper access controls

From what I've heard that type of information is only held on a special higher-security "logs" cluster and the code accessing that data is subject to additional review by Google's privacy division before it is allowed access to the data. I think there may be special ways to manually access some of that data, but even requesting that capability would automatically trigger an audit after the fact.

I mean sure, but that doesn't mean I expect them to sell it to other people.

But the Internet told me Google doesn't sell data, they're stalwart stewards who merely review it when making ad decisions??

> they resell the real time location and local data correlated to user characteristics, as data service to large discrete customers.

I do not understand what resell means here. Who is google selling to first?

Assuming here you consider the users giving up their privacy as the primary product being sold in maps.

This seems wrong. I don't think the average business owner has the capability to reverse engineer the anonymous tokens that represent hash IDs. Also, it's good to go in and reset that occasionally with Google. I gave up on it and switched to apple, tho. Far as I can tell, they don't ever sell that info, even in anonymous hash # form. I'm happy to be proven wrong other than "wHy wOuLd yOu tRuSt aPPle?" .

This wasn’t a product for the average business owner, it was for megacorps to make strategic decisions with.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification

That said:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy

However it wasn’t clear how high quality the differential privacy algorithm was or if it was attackable. But the nefariousness of its use against groups and demographics was fairly apparent.

Technically I don’t think it’s resold, as google hasn’t bought the data from anyone. But I think what the author meant is that Google also uses the data for ads, etc and then sells it.

Govts included. Govt can use the data as long as a company will sell it to them without laws considering it to be warrantless spying.

Not directly related but last time I was this creeped out is when a antivirus company wanted to sell us crazy amount of data on our customers.

Apparently AV companies lose money on the customer endpoint protection (it’s basically for free!) but make it up on selling users data. Also on the business licenses though

GeForce experience tracks every single window you have open, sending the title and window information, along with every single spot that you click on your screen to Nvidia, tied to your now mandatory account.

That was a couple years back. Who knows how much more invasive it’s gotten since.

Oh. And this data is considered to be “valuable debugging information”, so is not prevented by opting out of analytics.

Good to know! Uninstalling when I get home. Windows has really become a big bag of certified malware and adware. I always feel a bit dirty when I play a game on my windows pc, and now I know why.

>Windows has really become a big bag of certified malware and adware.

This 100%. I would include Azure too.

I actively try not to use Windows every time I get a chance. I am so glad a company like Apple exists. I agree Apple might not be 100% right on privacy but they are pretty darn close that I a live with.

The irony here is that you will get NVIDIA (and AMD) drivers vendored through Windows Update automatically by default. These work fine for 3D acceleration, and don't install GFE or require an account.

You'll just be a few versions behind, not sure what their release cadence is for this. But as far as I know this is a net positive to the Windows PC user and potentially eliminates needing to deal with GFE/Adrenalin as long as you are satisfied with the builds Microsoft is shipping you.

Except the telemetry service was moved into the drivers in 2016, and isn’t a part of GFE any more.

:-/

I actually was racking my brain since I haven't seen any major nvidia callouts on my DNS block, but I use a 3090.

Then I remembered I game in linux, on steam.

Well, PiHole stops one particular endpoint for sure. And it's called several thousands times during a 3-hour gaming session. Pretty creepy indeed.

Now we just wait for them to do DNS over HTTPS and domain fronting to a generic cloudflare endpoint.

There is absolutely no benefit to me the user to force me to create an account. What a deeply frustrating user experience (especially when I have to dig around for my password just to update a graphics driver?!) I hope someone wakes up at Nvidia and removes the account requirement. Why do they even do it?

The one thing that I like about mandatory accounts like this is that they're a strong indication that the company is abusive and you should remove any of their software immediately. It makes the problem obvious.

Nvidia is on top of the world right now and companies on the rise often make really stupid long-term customer alienating decisions. Nvidia won't miss any on of as an individual customer at all. For these types of situations, usually at some point the things that were pushing the company upwards slow or stop while the damage from their arrogance accumulates enough to start causing real harm. After some foot dragging and false reforms, the company eventually has to do something to repair the damage and by then, those who enacted those policies are usually gone.

I believe it, but do you have a source? I have a few friends I'd like to inform of this.

Funny, because I was wrong. Here’s the Nvidia privacy policy:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/privacy-policy/

How I was wrong is was in the “valuable debugging information”. Because you can actually disable the sending of debug and crash statistics, but you cannot disable the collection of tracking everything you do except for password boxes!

The original source on the telemetry was a print magazine, CanardPC, but this is referenced quite a bit.

I was additionally wrong the GeForce Experience matters. This is currently untrue. After the original article was released of how much spying Nvidia does, the telemetry package was moved to the driver rather than GeForce experience.

Long story short: if you have an Nvidia video card and have not actively disabled nvtmmon then Nvidia is tracking every window you open, how long it’s open, which windows have focus and for how long, window locations titles etc, along with clicks (but not keyboard strokes) etc. *It is not only tracking games. It tracks everything. It does this with just the driver*. If you have GeForce experience, then that information is tied to your sensitive personal information. If you do not opt out, they sell that to advertisers. If you do opt out, the collection happens anyway, but they claim they’re not sending it to third parties.

Where do you opt out if you don't have GeForce experience at all?

I’ve just learned: you don’t. I thought this was limited to just GeForce experience, but it’s not.

You need to kill Nvidia telemetry services (one site has it listed as nmtvmon).

Another option would be to block traffic to Nvidia from leaving your network (pihole captures at least some Nvidia telemetry, not sure if it blocks all). I don’t have a list of urls or IPs to look out for.

Wow. Thanks for the response. That's pretty bad.

Where does your link support what you are claiming? Clicking "see more" on all the sections and searching, there is no mention of "valuable debubbing information". Under "Using NVIDIA Products" section it lists GeForce experience, but not plain graphics cards or their drivers. I have no nvtmmon.exe running and the folder

    C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\NvTelemetry\reports

Has almost empty files last modified 2019.

> If you do opt out, the collection happens anyway, but they claim they’re not sending it to third parties.

For EU-based customers, how can this be GDPR-compliant?

I see nothing related to "title and window information" nor "every single spot that you click on your screen". Why did you dodge the question?

I use glasswire firewall and I just checked nvidia's activity and it doesn't even amount to a megabyte (uploaded) in the last week. I'm thinking this is tinfoil hat stuff.

Hey great I was just wondering if there was a little snitch for windows

https://www.glasswire.com

I think you’re being misled by insane JavaScript bundles re how much information can be conveyed in small compressed text files.

Capturing window titles and how long they have focus over a weeks logging takes a couple bytes of text…

Sounds like a lot to me.

> it doesn't even amount to a megabyte (uploaded) in the last week.

That seems like a lot for a piece of software that doesn't have to send anything whatsoever in order to do its job.

I’m a little surprised no one has MitM the telemetry service and reverse engineered what it’s sending.

Assuming they're using halfway decent cryptography, then doing this is nontrivial. But there are probably people working on it, and if so, they may eventually succeed.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is 970KB uncompressed, 228KB with bzip2. You may be able to compress the whole thing in 1MB with some effort.

We've reached the point where, even when you are paying for it, you are the product.

Where's capitalism to go once it's milked that cash cow to saturation? Think of the poor shareholders.

I can honestly say that at the very least, I wasn't aware of that in 2012, IF it was happening. And probably it wasn't.

And in the monetization meetings it was never even discussed.

This was in 2019 and it was a new product.

I was working on web maps before google maps steamrolled (effectively killed) the competition. The big thing for us was that we couldn't compete with the storage and licensing requirements for satellite imagery. I suspect it was the same for other local competitors at the time: our local data was objectively better, but google's was just sexier, and you couldn't compete with free.

I've long since switched fields, but the irony is that the company I was working for survived and I heard maps for various business use is now much more expensive than our offer used to be and several large clients eventually switched back.

As a user, I loved maps when it came out. The pre-rendered tiled maps were clean and fast. The web UI was clean and responsive. Streetview was (and still is) absolutely mind boggling. Heck, I even applied to work for google maps at the time.

Nowdays maps is an absolute shitshow. I find it utterly unusable for almost any purpose except for streetview, which is the only reason I still know how it looks like.

Let's hope they don't forget about the indrect revenue because honestly the only reason I even use google for local results at all is google maps.

Ads and Search use the data from maps to make up the difference.

Even just the ability of search to serve local seeking queries is a huge defensive moat, but the marginal revenue from having a model of the world is worth it.

Wow, this is crazy insight.

From my perspective as an advertiser, mobile/local PPC has taken over, be it Local Service Ads or regular search ads listings that show up in maps.

SMART ads that use your GMB profile instead of your website go GANGBUSTERS for brick and mortar clients, who love them.

I wonder how long you have been gone, and if it's possible that they have taken over so much since you left that your statements here are no longer true.

speaking of monetization, i’d happily pay a $10 monthly fee for these features as a biker:

- weather along route

Google knows the weather, it knows the route… Just add a layer! better yet suggest a reroute. i pay for a separate app for this currently.

- motorcycle friendly features

bigger buttons for usage with gloves; selection of straight, curvy, unpaved etc roads; right now it’s just Highway or non Highway

- ability to create a group and show their live locations on the map.

Something better than WhatsApp live location. The current approach that Google maps uses is cumbersome and non-intuitive. also if a route is updated, an option to update everyone else’s shared route.

- local info, POI, etc

you know my location and interests, tell me some interesting stuff over Bluetooth about the city or POI’s i’m passing by.

A rotten spirit enshittens the smallest UI.

One of my biggest peeves with Google Maps is its lack of respect for my zoom level. When I tap the centering button, NO, I don't want to zoom in. If I wanted to zoom in, I'd zoom in!

Couple that with the roughly decade-old removal of the +/- zoom buttons, and I basically don't bother with Google Maps any more except for turn-by-turn navigation.

Why do you need +/- zoom buttons? You can just double-tap the screen but hold down the second tap, then slide your finger up or down to zoom in/out as an alternative to pinch-zooming.

That's not what I'd call "discoverable" by any stretch of the imagination.

Criticize Google Maps all you want, but it is easily one of the most useful apps to me, especially as someone who's been been living nomadically the last 5 years. It's kind of scary how dependent I am on this app. Anytime I need to find a restaurant, dentist, electronics store, etc. - I'm looking first on Google Maps and my life is basically dictated by the results.

I have lists like "Places to Work" which is a list of all the nice coffee shops and places I like to work out of (currently have 200). I star hotels + AirBnBs I'm staying in, and bookmark a ton of things. I rely on it for public transportation. If I could only pick 3 apps on my phone, Google Maps would definitely be one of them.

I do wish there were better alternatives and I hate being overly dependent on one company. Unfortunately the open source alternatives like OpenStreetMap don't really even compare.

I have a similar experience. The addition of all the places details and reviews that are accessible inside of Google Maps has actually expanded its usefulness. Google Maps has grown to be more than just navigation software for me. I live in the US but was in Berlin recently. It seems that Google reviews have supplanted Yelp as the main platform for reviews over there. It honestly made things simpler and easier and I can see in the US it looks to be trending in the same direction.

I actually have more of an issue with the busyness of google.com and the search in Youtube than I do with the changes in Google Maps.

Same. It's one of my pinned app shortcuts that appear on every screen, right next to camera and messages.

Same here. I complain a lot about google, I mean a LOT. I use Firefox, I tried DDG for a while and now am trying to mostly use ChatGPT (which actually is typically immediately helpful in code questions which is my number one google search activity.

However Maps and Gmail. I don't have and probably don't need a replacement.

Critising products that serve billions of users every day as "useless" is a latest fun past time for a sect of contrarian HNers that can't think of the world outside their use-cases and bubble.

High usage figures does not equate to being perfect or untouchable. Often it’s just a result of market dominance, or worse.

It's incredible how of touch HNers are.

Even the hotspots functionality is useful - if I'm in a new city, I can see the highlighted areas where the best restaurants and bars are.

Waze is a decent alternative, if not mostly for the community driven aspect of it. Sometimes it’s too aggressive to save 1-2 minutes but it knows tolls , when they’re open, and just as accurate if not more than google maps at times

I don't understand this at all, how can Waze be a decent alternative when it doesn't show, well, anything? [At least where I live,] there's no photos, rating, comments, no info about opening times, no way to get there unless I'm driving (which in this European capital I am totally not), and even if I'm driving there's no info on parking zones (you can't just park anywhere on the street). Waze is literally 100 % useless for me in the city.

I understand the ads and everything else, I don't not enjoy it but I understand.

What I really don't get is the product is hiding a lot of stuff for no reason. Whenever I zoom in my neighbourhood: it doesn't display all the streets, some shops are missing even at maximum zoom, search is removing some results that should match my query, etc...

I have slowly lost trust in the products (except for navigation), it's still my main source but I usually double check with google search or apple map.

That’s what you get when you fire the last actual mappers and just leave developers to keep it running. Google thrives on data quantity, not on quality.

> Yet no matter how far in I zoom in, Google Maps doesn’t always apply a label to the street I’m standing on. It just remains blank.

The same thing happens to me. The most useful piece of information is hidden. I've never understood that decision.

I'm always so annoyed at Google Maps for not displaying street names. Sometimes it doesn't matter how much you zoom or pan, it just won't show it.

I know it knows them because it announces them just fine during navigation.

Why? What's the point? It's a map. Street names are pretty much the #1 most important thing.

If organic maps did traffic, reviews and opening hours I'd never touch google maps again. Literally everything else is worse.

I'm surprised it doesn't do opening hours, as that information is readily available in the OSM tags (though maybe a bit sparsely compared to Google Maps).

As for the rest; yeah I'd love to see a serious effort to get an OMS-based map up to feature parity with Google Maps. Place photos, contacts integration, and the timeline would be big ones for me.

Is is possible but the data is more frequently populated and generally more reliable on google maps.

Google has some sort of system that auto-calls shops, I think, and asks them to verify that their hours are correct.

It's still pretty crap and I'm sure OSM could beat google maps at that game too but it doesn't seem to be a focus.

A lot of that information on Google Maps is, at least partially, crowd-sourced. OSM-based apps could do the same thing (indeed, it's already sort of possible by just editing OSM directly with a separate app), though they don't have nearly as many users as Google Maps does so it wouldn't be quite as effective.

They have less data and their process for crowdsourcing is not as good. For instance, I'm pretty sure google maps validates user inputs by email and by phone if that doesn't work.

I also have a suspicion they put in random data as a means of motivating users to "fix" it where it's wrong. I've gone to one restaurant gmaps has said is open and it's been closed and had lunch at a restaurant next door it said was closed which was open.

Neither one seems to be able to handle stuff like public holiday working hours, odd days off, holidays, etc.

> Why? What's the point? It's a map. Street names are pretty much the #1 most important thing.

My pet theory here is mislaid/misaligned interests: 90% of Google Maps users are probably using it for automotive navigation, not for identifying cross-streets.

A more strident person would argue that Google is consequently, in part, responsible for reinforcing America's obscene car dependence. I'll leave them to make that argument :-)

I don't want to say it's always true, but every time I see that (or rather don't see a street name) and investigate it, the name is there, just not on-screen. It's still idiotic design, but if you traverse along the length of a road the name is visible, just elsewhere.

This complaint is interesting to me because in the last few years I've noticed street names have become more and more abundant. For example, I am looking at the 100ft zoom level (what my scale shows in the bottom right) and this street which is 2000 ft long is labeled 9 times. For major rivers there's always a label on screen. This didn't used to be the case for me. I used to have to really work to find labels but now it's very good.

Me exactly. I don't know why they diaplay road names just sparsely. Sometimes I had to scroll far to get the road name.

Is it just me or have you guys also noticed that the routes suggested by Google Maps have gotten worse?

It seems that it only takes into account current traffic jams and not the ones which will occur 30mins into the trip.

For instance, there's this spot in my city where I know there is a traffic jam at around 3:20 PM every day. I usually set off from home around 2:50 PM, which means I'll hit that congested area by 3:20 PM. Interestingly, there are a couple of alternative routes I could take to avoid getting stuck. However, Google Maps keeps pushing me towards the route that's bound to get jammed, simply because there's no traffic showing at the exact moment (2:50 PM) when I'm starting. Doesn't it make sense for the app to use past data to predict the traffic jam?

On the other hand, it often insists on taking me through strange shortcuts and weird backroads just to save a minute or two.

Personally I’ve found it’s been that way for many years. I associate it with the app that directs me in to traffic.

I came here to look for someone talking about it and totally agree, Google Maps routes are getting really worse over time and now I switched to Apple Maps almost exclusively.

I can understand the jam thing but the weird route thing is crazy, especially because that route often makes you spend more time not less. It prefers weird backroads with lots of turns instead of straight larger roads (and that's stupid) but a thing I noticed traveling a lot for work in a hilly area is that it doesn't seem to take road pendency into account. Sometimes it makes you go up and down a hill instead of staying in the valley road that goes around it: it take twice the time IRL but is like it thinks "whoa, 5km instead of 7, that's a great optimization" and that's incredibly stupid.

Apple maps is more conservative and tries to stick to larger roads if possible only sending you into more obscure ones if it is very convenient.

Another thing is that Google Maps is really aggressive on labeling something as a road: sometimes they are off roads, tractor paths or large trails that a car cannot travel on but it doesn't care.

Those are my impressions traveling mostly in Italy and bordering countries.

I don't use maps much because it talks too much and unlike Yandex you have to both listen to it and look at it to make full use of it. It's zooming features are shit. It doesn't reroute automatically when it think you've already arrived etc etc.

But I do recall seeing some sort of green, fuel save mode which I assumed would prefer straights to hills etc.

> It prefers weird backroads with lots of turns instead of straight larger roads (and that's stupid)

Part of that could be driving style.

Getting to one nearby city really has two main routes for me—the single lane highway, or the backroads with a bunch of weird turns and stuff.

You hop on the highway and besides a couple of towns you pass through you more or less just space out for an hour and then you’re there. Your speed on the highway is pretty much fixed. There’s heavy enough traffic that even if you were to try and pass and drive aggressively you’re never really beating the map estimate. Often you come in a bit longer because it only takes one person doing 15-20 under the speed limit to just create a rolling roadblock.

The back roads, however, are basically empty. How fast you get there is pretty much up to you.

The highway is faster and less stressful for my wife. The back roads are faster and less stressful for me. I’m not even speeding much or driving aggressively. I’m just comfortable actually doing the speed limit through those areas and passing where necessary.

I haven't driven in mainland Italy but Google Maps is nearly useless in Sicily. Their road network is designed for itinerary-style navigation which to my knowledge no navigation app has a concept of. Like you said it's foolish to assume that backroads are conveniently navigable as if the only differences are speed limits and number of lanes (and maybe hills for "eco mode").

I've noticed it post covid. The refresh rate or weightage of current situation seems to have been reduced by a lot.

It's even worse for us cyclists. Regularly tries to kill me in the routes it picks.

Try https://cycle.travel/ for cycle routes. I find it much better at finding quieter routes.

Oh that's pretty awesome. Thanks for the link!

I also like https://brouter.damsy.net/latest/

That's your neighbors trying to kill you.

(Apple guy here) Apple Maps also has cycling directions now, including an option to avoid busy roads. Maybe that will work?

apple maps doesnt have cycling maps for _amsterdam_. none of the eu countries do where i have been

Ah--looks like you're right. I hope it will arrive soon--Apple is still building out features around the world.

There's a table of feature availability for the top 60 metro areas here:

https://www.justinobeirne.com/apple-maps-feature-availabilit...

Have you tried Waze? I find that better at detecting jams and routing around them.

It's deeply concerning that the only alternative to Google Maps being terrible is to use Google's Waze. The only thing stopping another Inbox situation is the threat of anti-competition law.

What do you mean another Inbox situation?

An alternative UX for gmail that Google killed.

how does anti-competition law apply to that kind of situation though? I think anti-competition law would only apply when they bought waze, so while it may be disadvantageous for users if they discontinue it, I don't think there's anything in anti-competition law stopping them from killing waze now that they own it

I tried it. It started pinging me mid drive to call out the nearby Burger King or something and offer to reroute me there.

Last thing I need when I’m trying to navigate unfamiliar urban areas while operating a heavy piece of machinery at high speed is more distractions and more things to process.

Fair enough. I block the ads at the DNS level, but still get a placeholder white box on my phone. On Android Auto though I've never seen anything, although I'm sure its coming.

I only get ads when standing still.

In the app, you also can't adjust your departure time to see if there's a better time to leave. You have to use the web UI which doesn't have a way to share this information (beyond a starting point and finishing point) with the app.

They added this feature to the mobile app years ago. https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/01/22/google-maps-lets-yo...

> Is it just me or have you guys also noticed that the routes suggested by Google Maps have gotten worse?

Maybe because more people use it? So you cannot really be sole person avoiding traffic jam.

I noticed this one too as I was planning my route last night. Google Maps can’t detect one way streets anymore and suggested roads that are marked no entry. I’m glad I zoomed in and was able to read the sign.

I am not sure what is happening to Google Maps lately but this is bad.

Even worse: here in Hamburg, a major German city with very high Google Maps usage, The S-Bahn line S1 is closed through the tunnel right in the centre of the city an entire month, and yet it has not been updated at all. Same thing occurred when the S1 from the airport to HBF was closed last month. These are very high capacity lines and it is tourist season. Anyone trying to use Google Maps is going to be very confused. Closures are only taken into account like 50% of the time.

Hamburg has almost half the population of Berlin, yet Google can't keep up with major scheduled line closures.

Google Maps has become noticeably worse at public transit directions in the last few years. In NYC it seemingly does not ingest service changes from the MTA API, I’ve had multiple friends complain about it.

Apple Maps is updated in near real time, I tell anyone who listens to use it for PT directions. The “Transit” app is great too.

You're expected to use the HVV-App.

https://www.hvv.de/en

Edditt: links to ios and android at the rigth bottom side of the screen (a.k.a scroll down)

I use the HVV app but no you aren’t, since Google Maps usually does account for closures!

Time to start rating zero stars.

This is something I have wondered a lot about: whether the routing is based on current conditions, or if it takes into account what usually happens on your route as your journey unfolds.

Your comment seems to suggest the former.

I live in France and school vacation, especially during the winter break, yield to horrendous tragic keeps from the Paris region towards the Alps. I needed once to drive through them, but not towards the ski resorts, just more south.

There were several possible routes but the fastest one was chosen despite the fact that it would hit the bottleneck right at the worst time. Another route, summer 20 min longer, was not taken into consideration at all despite avoiding the bottleneck.

Similar experience and I which I knew why they offer a particular route.

I often end up regretting using Google maps if I know the routes, usually I feel I'm happier with my choice, not sure if it's a psychological thing but I don't think so because I feel I consistently make better choices based on my knowledge of an area.

I guess there can be a lot to know about a road, especially in regional areas which Google probably knows nothing about.

The other thing I find interesting is that most people I know cannot drive anywhere without Google maps or similar, so there are probably a lot more people using these routes than alternatives.

I wish google would do weekly updates here. I live in a small city in the midwest USA and one road has been closed for construction for over a month and google maps still wants me to go that way.

Why do you use it to travel a route you go every day and know you know better than the app?

> Why won't you show me the street name?

I've been running into this a lot lately. No matter how much I zoom -- no street name. This is Mapping 101.

No, mapping 101 is showing me a scale. Without a scale it is a drawing not a map.

A for everyone telling me I can enable it always in settings, I will answer that it still gets removed when you start navigation with 'Directions'.

But I still agree street omission is pretty bad.

You just reminded me of my own mapping annoyance. Apple Maps, while navigating, will keep zooming the map as I approach my destination. The scale keeps changing! For a lot of areas, this makes it possible to glance at the map, see that my dot is 32 millimeters away from the destination, drive for a bit, glance again… still 32 mm away. The same unit length on my screen represents 3 miles or 300 feet.

I wish there was some visual indication of the scale, other than a tiny line in the bottom right corner.

Something that catches me out when driving is the scale adjusting for speed. It makes sense, but a junction that looks quite close suddenly starts moving further away from you as you slow down for it and the maps zooms in. It's an odd UI quirk.

It's really bad in London. Instead of telling you the road is called Oxford Street (quite a famous road!) it shows instead the road number, A40, which is not known by 95% of the local population, nor by 100% of visitors.

I've had this exact problem before. Extremely frustrating!

A population of 9 million but big tech's allergy to scaling customer support means they don't pay a local person to adjust things for local expectations.

But why would they? We have to use it anyway.

They have a large office in London, so their own staff put up with it.

I once met a Googler who had previously worked on maps. I made a few grumbles (railway lines at the time were almost invisible, but very useful for orienting yourself when you exit a station, gardens were grey yet parks were green, "Transit" only shows the London Underground so it misses most of the local rail travel routes in South London, etc).

He agreed with everything, but said the staff working on Maps were all in California and wouldn't care, if they could even be made to understand the issues.

I remember when Google changed the colours of roads, and I filed a bug report. Motorways are blue darnit.

Actually the teams that would implement those fixes are not really in California (rather Seattle, Sydney, Tokyo, among others), but the problem is more the diffusion of responsibility and lack of ownership. Teams all have different metrics they're trying to drive or features they're focused on, but no one is responsible for the overall quality and user experience of "Google Maps" as a whole.

All of the things you mentioned have internal bugs, pitch decks, or maybe even patches pushed by individuals or whole teams. Likely even directors or VPs agree. But the organizational friction is massive and it's very hard to ship anything unless it's crystal clear that it is going to directly move a metric that is a focus for this year. And even then, if launching this feature touches multiple divisions, it still might not happen just because of the massive coordination effort.

That said, the green coloring was probably fixed in 2020. Transit has had a lot of work in the past five years, so maybe a chance London overground rail is fixed? The transit line rendering is still terrible, so you should probably use Apple Maps for that—theirs is beautiful.

The discussion was around 8-10 years ago, so I'm probably mixing it up with Seattle.

Scrolling around the UK with the transit layer active, I only see the complete metro/light rail/tram systems of London and Sheffield (incomplete/missing "heavy rail" for both). Newcastle has one metro line, but not the others. No other city's lines are shown even though the stations/stops are often mapped. (I checked Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Blackpool.)

In much of South London "normal" trains are the primary public transport. The stations are marked, the railways shown in light grey, and there are usually even timetables listed [1] but there's no "Transit" line shown. These lines and services aren't shown anywhere in the country.

[2] is a public transport view of OSM. The colours are poor, but the orange lines are mostly missing in Google.

[3] is easier to read but only a railway map, though over 90% of lines in Britain will have passenger service. I generally use this if I'm planning a flexible trip somewhere unfamiliar.

I see some long-distance lines are shown in Japan, though surely only a fraction of what exists. They also get a darker shade of grey, so there's been some local effort there. There are still missing local lines in Tokyo though. I know Copenhagen, and there's been a significant improvement recently! The city/suburban trains are now shown. The regional trains are still missing though, which includes the train from the airport to the city centre.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Herne+Hill/@51.4521063,-0....

[2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/51.4095/-0.1868&layers...

[3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/51.4095/-0.1868&layers...

Native SE Londoner here. IMO Google is accurately reporting the transport in the area, it's not their fault that there is a shocking lack of it.

Lines like Victoria-Orpington and CharingX-Hayes are not the metro and probably shouldn't be highlighted in the transport layer in my opinion.

The solution you are looking for is TFL taking over the suburban southeastern lines. That's what happened in my adopted home of NE London and today they are orange lines on the map. We also got brand new trains and 4tph on Sundays!

You can use Open Street Mmap and a suitable app of your choice. OSM is strong on the local level. Check out https://organicmaps.app/

Does this show on the car's display or is it limited to showing on the phone's screen?

Organic Maps supports Carplay, but not yet the Android variant You can however not use both the phone and Carplay at the same time

If you need that, you can try https://www.magicearth.com

Looking at Google Maps you get the feeling it's optimized for being a road atlas for long-distance driving. There's so few details on the maps and basically the only thing visible is the road network (and businesses) until about zoom level 17.

Not only that, but also city and village-names (especiqlly when the map is in directions-mode). Total bollocks for a maps app.

Sometimes the decision is very complicated and lazy.. it can show, or not, change angle a bit and it comes back.. or comes back after 5 seconds.

>> Why won't you show me the street name?

>I've been running into this a lot lately. No matter how much I zoom -- no street name. This is Mapping 101.

Google Maps does this all over Belgium, showing hotels and restaurants and shops and never the street name. Very frustrating indeed.

I use OSM for street names, because it just works.

Another stupid thing they've done is to use local language for street and place names. Why the hell even have a phone language then? Just switch everything over to whatever language people are speaking in my immediate vicinity then! There is a reason I have chosen English as the language of my phone, because that's what I can read properly.

Not sure if I understand your point. If you're in Spain you want to see Street names written in Kanji or Greek? Or do you want the street name translated to your phone language?

I want the names as they would appear in the language I can read, in my case that is English. Otherwise it is literally useless for me to show the names at all.

Do you mean the script/alphabet, or the language?

At some point I noticed someone had "helpfully" translated some concert venue names in Copenhagen into English, so Krudtønden became "The Powder Keg", etc. That's not useful, as locals might well not understand what it means if you ask directions or search for a website. It's on Østerfælled Torv, would you have that read as Eastern Commons Market?

Places with other alphabets seem to vary. Greece shows me only Latin transliterations, but Syria shows me both Latin and Arabic in many cases, which is useful — I can read one, and match the shape of the letters for the other.

Not furnishing your users with knowledge that could reduce their reliance on your service is Marketing 101.

Google maps does not want help people gain awareness of their surroundings or improve their navigation skills. It wants users to depend on Google maps.

It's been like that for a frustratingly long time. I've tried Open Street Map, but it doesn't quite cut the mustard (skittles). I think I'm going to have to try again, OSM fits my ideology better.

> TOO MANY ADS CLUTTER THE MAP

...he complained, in an article on a website where 30% of vertical space is used by an autoplay video ad featuring an idiot asking me whether I'd eat "mustard Skittles".

Ironic.

I was never able to stop the auto play video. Just make it small and pinned to the bottom. Playing something and wasting data the whole time I read the article.

And one of the advertisement's X doesn't work and just opens the link. It'd be funny if it wasn't sad.

Out of admittedly slightly perverse curiosity I opened the site without adblock : at some point when scrolling the whole page is covered with ads. An eyesore indeed.

Curious. I don't see any ads ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

If you're not using an adblocker in this day and age in 2023, you're doing it wrong.

It got through AdGuard on iOS Safari. Is there a better option?

Mobile doesn't have ad blocking, at least on iOS. Which is why I pay for Youtube premium.

I'm a huge fan of https://nextdns.io which works on iOS.

You can get ad blockers on Safari iOS. I think I have AdBlocker and Wipr. They don't work quite as well as a legitimate adblocker extension IMO, but I'm pretty sure they block a big number of ads and other garbage.

AdGuard works in Safari, and can block ads on youtube. I’ve been using this setup for years now and it’s been without problems. The experience is obviously not as good as the app, but it does what it’s supposed to, and I think the worse UX a plus because I do not spend as much time on the platform.

Brave browser has it built in, and there is a way to download an app to use specifically as an adblocker, though I forget how. I remember it not working very well, which is why I just gave up and use Brave instead.

AdGuard works in iOS Safari for free. (The Mac version is also good.)

(Although you should continue to pay for YouTube Premium. I do, it's well worth it.)

I prefer to just not visit websites that are full of obnoxious ads. I find it's a good screening technique for garbage content that isn't worth reading in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, there's a significant correlation between useless sensationalized clickbait articles and websites fully of intrusive trashy ads.

I would add to this article that a major issue with Google Maps has been businesses trying to SEO-pad their business names on Google Maps, to the detriment of readability.

This is also against their TOS – the "business name" form is supposed to be their legally registered business name, the one that they probably have signage for. Moderators simply don't enforce this, and with Map Maker basically gone, the community of moderators is somewhat of a cloak and dagger group now.

I have tried to clean some of these up via submissions, because in spite of agreeing with the points of the article and using mostly Apple Maps for navigation, Google Maps still is better in terms of having a lot of community sourced data and overall place discoverability (along with Yelp, which Apple Maps seems to no longer source data from).

Examples of these business names:

- {name} - {city name} Axe Throwing

- {name} License Agency - (Vehicle/Vessel not drivers license)

- {name} - Lunch Buffet (Friday-Sunday) - {cuisine} Restaurant - {city name}

And many now have:

- {name of a local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}

Some of this is a UX problem or perhaps data architecture problem – in the case of local chains, I imagine many are dealing with people calling in orders and showing up at the wrong place to pick up their order. Google Maps could do a better job showing the neighborhood/locality/"local name" of the area in the search results.

Others are just a lack of consistent moderation.

This would be solved by dividing it up on 2 distinct fields, a business name field and a title field. Then a business can put their SEO crap in the title field and google maps can decide how much of the info to display when.

Of course moderation would still be a thing, perhaps a character limit of 25 for the name should be enforced unless they can demonstrate why that is too little.

Coincidently the separate fields is how Apple Maps does it, although their title field appears made up of a category list item, presumably to keep it consistent and free of spam.

I was disappointed that apple took yelp stuff away from apple maps as well. For restaurants though, clicking on the "menu" link for restaurants takes me to the yelp page for that restaurant.

> {name of a local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}

Wait, what's wrong with this? This is just good practice. It's helpful to be able to, when communicating with someone, unambiguously refer to the exact location, e.g. Westville Chelsea v Westville East v Westville Hudson v Westville Wall Street.

Because on a map it's already implicit in where the pin actually is. You're staring at a pin in Westville Chelsea.

Problem is the same name is also used for lists of search results – having a neighbourhood name being displayed there can definitively be helpful to distinguish multiple branches of the same company, while also having a higher chance of being at least roughly recognisable to people as compared to specific street names (which is what Google currently displays for POI listings).

Yes exactly, if you want to, say, meet at a specific Marriott hotel and put it in directions, this helps disambiguate. Google Maps does a good job of it without, but will still show you completely different ones if you don’t have the unique-ish name.

Every branch of a hotel chain should have a unique name, at least per city. Way too many mistakes get made otherwise.

You're not always looking at a map at all times though. If I verbally tell a friend "Let's meet up for lunch at Westville Chelsea", they can then unambiguously locate the exact one later on on their own.

Also, lots of people (especially visitors!) don't know where the neighborhoods actually are. So having the names of the locations in the pins is better than them struggling to figure out exactly which of a series of identically named pins is actually the right one in an area they don't know about.

I already know where I’m looking.

And the map TOS state it should be the business name.

I pointed this out as a UX problem, which it is.

> I already know where I’m looking.

You do, because you're native to the area. The person you're talking to, possibly not.

Business names have all this useless PTY LTD and not necessarily the differentiator that is required. E.g. two fast food chain places operated by the same franchise holder but are located on opposite sides of the highway. For me as map use I am interested in identifying the one on the lane Northbound in the list of search results while driving.

Obligatory business listing: https://goo.gl/maps/nRH1hnjAkJKfpLcu8 (yes, this is real and apparently pretty decent) (and yes, the name went viral which doubled the marketing win)

All of those suck except the last example, which is actually extremely useful and helpful to users

https://sports.yahoo.com/nyc-restaurant-named-thai-food-2027...

> {name of a local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}

What I'm starting to see a lot which is frustrating is:

{name of completely not local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}

Such as "Local Town Plumbing" with a national telephone number to some plumber referral service and will be located where there is an empty field or other non-business.

What drives me nuts is using the "Search this area" feature once I zoom in. Especially if there's an add anywhere in a 20mi radius.

Google Maps usually shows far too much stuff, so I zoom into the area where I am and want to just search that square so I can browse the list easier.

But then it'll zoom out and auto-select the first ad miles away - completely defeating the purpose.

Absence of street names is not accidental. I wonder if the theory is that leaving them off is more likely to ensure you remain dependent on the app.

These desperate antifeatures drive me crazy these days

I don't know whether this actually happens, but it's an interesting thought that removing street names could indeed lead to higher engagement metrics.

When you look for them, perverse incentives abound.

I wasn't sure if I was imagining it but this seemed to change in the last year or so for restaurants on my phone. I used to zoom into the local area when travelling, and click the food icon to see what's around. Now it zooms out and shows a 25km radius. Useless when I want to pick up lunch within a 5 minute drive.

I have to zoom in and pan around like a bird pecking for crumbs.

At least Google has this feature. I'd like to use Apple Maps sometimes, but the search is terrible and you can't even coerce it with a feature like "search in this area".

Every time I use Google Maps, I feel so helpless, and frankly, stupid. On Desktop, I simply can't figure it out how to switch to A-B route mode, nor how to trigger street view. I literally just click randomly in a more and more frustrated way until suddenly the option appears.

And on Android I just avoid the app. I hate that I couldn't turn off the automatic compass. Every time I finally manage to orient myself when in a new place, the map starts spinning like crazy.

I truly feel old when using Google Maps.

Well, it’s not built for you. Cows may not like milking machines either, but the farmer doesn’t care. Google Maps exists to further Google’s surveillance platform and search monopoly. User preference is incidental.

It’s just like Internet Explorer on Windows 20 years ago. Microsoft only needed to make a good product long enough to leverage it into their other monopoly products, then they no longer gave a shit. We can hope Google Maps suffers the same fate.

But a milking machine that spills half of the milk doesn't help the farmer nor the cow.

> Cows may not like milking machines either, but the farmer doesn’t care. Google Maps exists to further Google’s surveillance platform and search monopoly. User preference is incidental.

I can’t help but roll my eyes reading stuff like this. Cows have no choice in their lives, Google Maps users can switch to an (increasingly competitive) alternative with very little switching cost.

Of course it’s in Google’s interest to keep their product usable.

Google Maps exist(ed) to get the people who wrote Google Maps promoted. The other stuff doesn't really matter. Google is not well run enough to be able to care about those things!

> Cows may not like milking machines

Ok, off topic, but having grown up around cows, they will line up each day waiting for their chance to get on the milking machine. They very much do like them.

Oh, you’re totally right, of course :) It’s also not true that farmers don’t care— practically all of them do. I was reaching for a quick metaphor, even though it’s not an exact fit.

I'm skeptical that young people fare much better. Google Maps feels like it's in constant tension between all the super powerful features it has, and some PM who wants the UI to be as minimalistic as possible. End result is inscrutable.

I am surprised how much clearer the world is on openstreetmap.org which I just tried.

> nor how to trigger street view

You need to drag the "man" icon and drop it on the map.

I had to google that.

Win win for Google :-]

And while you're carefully dragging the "man" over to the street you're interested in (an interesting multi-hand challenge with most trackpads), Maps starts wildly gyrating and sliding the map around in an infinite scroll because you didn't center the "man" within one second or whatever.

I hate that UI. Why can't we just click on the "man", and then click on a spot to drop it?

>I hate that UI. Why can't we just click on the "man", and then click on a spot to drop it?

You can, actually. When you click it, all of the roads that have street view are highlighted with blue color. In this mode you can just click on the roads to go to street view.

> Why can't we just click on the "man", and then click on a spot to drop it?

That's exactly how it works.

Click the man, roads with street view data are highlighted, click a road.

For years now I have dragged the man to the place, because there was no indication to me that just clicking the man and then the place would work. But it does! Thanks for sharing that.

You have just solved one of the biggest struggles and mysteries of my life.

If you're by area 51 the "man" is a little UFO when you drag it. There's a few of these Easter eggs.

Buckingham Palace used to have a little Queen, but that is no longer the case.

They did a major redesign of the interface maybe ~8 years ago, and ever since I don't know where anything is.

Lately I'm particularly baffled by the bar at the top, which is a way to search without typing. I click "Transit" and I'm presented with a list filled mostly with bus stops, with no filters for rail etc. Great. Does it also switch me to the transit overlay, which might be helpful? No, of course not.

That was about the time they removed the scale, right?

> Every time I finally manage to orient myself when in a new place, the map starts spinning like crazy.

There's a "Keep North up" option while navigating, and I think if you click the "center map on me" button while not navigating one of the states will keep north up.

IMO smartphone compasses and gps are still too noisy to use anything other than "keep north up" as the default. Trying to navigate while your pin spins and jumps around on a map is dangerous and difficult, having the entire map spin around at the same time is just madness. I wouldn't be surprised if this decision hasn't killed someone.

No, tapping the "centre map on me" button switches between auto-twirly and north-is-up-by-default, but even when in north-is-up-by-default mode, it'll still misinterpret you pinching to zoom as thinking you want the map rotated. I hate it. I'd turn on a setting to have North as up always, completely disabling the rotate-by-two-fingers "feature". I can't imagine anyone actually finding that feature useful for anything.

The other setting I'd love to see is to switch off re-framing. Let's say I select a destination, then I'm curious how long it will take to get there, so I select directions. Then I scroll around a bit to see other things nearby and spot something interesting. I tap on it, and try to get directions there too, except directions is already active, so I either have to go through the rigmarole of "add stop, delete the other one", or press the back button a few times to come out of directions. Except when I do, Maps first zooms out to show my entire route, then zooms back in to the original destination, and now I have to scroll around and try and find that second thing again. I'd rather it just left the zoom alone, and let me choose where I want to be looking. Sure, have a button to frame what you're currently looking at if you want, but stop jerking all over the place.

If your problem occurs because of accidental zooming with two fingers, then there’s a solution for you.

You can zoom map with just one finger (I use thumb) – do almost a double click but instead of releasing the second click, hold it pressed. Now as you hold it, just move thumb up and down to zoom in and out.

It’s a feature I discovered accidentally a few years ago, and in my experience pretty much no one knows about it, but once shown, everyone finds it extremely useful.

The other way to get streetview is to turn it on as a layer on top of the map. You do that by hovering over the square on the bottom left. The most used layer is probably satellite imagery, but I occasionally use traffic and altitude lines as well.

You can type a sentence and Maps will start A-B Routing. Its a thidden shortcut that's been working for ages and is still supported gladly:

E.g. "from Berlin to Rome"

"Google Maps" is a misnomer. Call it "Google Business Search" or something similar, and the perceived problems disappear.

Google Maps provides a small fraction of the functions of a real map. And this fraction does not even cover the fundamentals: Street names, landmarks/points of interest, being able to draw or create marks on the map, and perhaps making basic measurements. Its main view has marginally more information than the "share location" screen of a messenger app.

It's a car-driving always-online consumer's guide to spending money. Extremely useful, but not a map.

That's not really true though is it. I use it countless times a week to navigate from my current location to point x l, generally a postal code or POI.

At no point during this do I have to interact with alternative businesses or way points.

I agree that Google Maps does work as a navigation aid in certain environments (e.g. dense urban) and certain transportation modalities (definitely cars, to a lesser extent public transport, bike and pedestrian).

In my experience it's also useable as a general street/road map. It's clearly not a topographical map; I think it would be foolish and potentially dangerous to rely on Google Maps to, say, hike in the Alps. A standard topographical map would fit that use case much better.

P.S. I don't quite follow some of the complaints on this thread about the UX. For example, I always see the map scale in the bottom-right corner of the app. It is true that street names are not always written onto the map; however, clicking on a street gives me a popup with the name (not the most ergonomic UX, but it's not like the app is trying to hide the info, as some commenters are claiming).

Another gem I never knew about: "clicking on a street gives me a popup with the name". You have to really click precisely, but that worked..!

>perhaps making basic measurements

Can be done. Right-click on PC, drop a pin and then choose "Measure distance" on mobile.

>being able to draw or create marks on the map

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/. Seems like they forgot to shut it down - it's design wasn't updated since 2013.

Incredible how out of touch HNers are. It's just a fucking maps app.

Probably not a popular opinion here, but I like Google Maps. Sure there's some clutter, but it's pretty good at navigation, public transit and searching for places. I don't know any better alternative.

My wife and I prefer navigating with Apple maps after Google Maps stagnated for years and years. Apple's voice instructions are incomparably better.

I want to like Apple Maps but their reliance upon Yelp for useful information infuriates me.

Reviews and user submitted content are an absolute nightmare. I can’t imagine how much of a legal headache it is for google.

Is this legal issue for Google? I think it is as many of the under maintain or moderated points of engagement just a service desert.

That extremely depends on your location - notice there's another thread above you complaining it doesn't use Yelp anymore.

eg the US and Australia now have built-in reviews.

The 3D view is a hilariously bad anti feature imo. Like the demo screenshot showing the Golden Gate Bridge and obscuring the actual road on the map is kind of funny.

I also hate not being able to keep north fixed on the screen unless I'm in CarPlay. That just doesn't make sense.

I generally like the 3d view, but I had a hilarious experience up in Marin where I was cresting a hill and planning to take an exit, with a turn I didn't know coming right after the exit.

The entirety of the next 3 steps, precisely what I cared about the most, was totally obscured by the hill in the 3d view.

The exact same hill I was seeing out my windshield. The hill in my windshield was the reason I was glancing at my mapping app for further guidance. facepalm

Wow you get that in CarPlay? In Android Auto there is no North, I hate it.

Apple maps is the only mapping software that's taken me to the wrong place, and it's done it several times. It also tried to put me into a permanent loop once, in Branson. Luckily it was a very small loop, or I might not have noticed, being a tourist.

One time on a very long road trip across Canada, Apple Maps decided to route me two hours north of the main highway on a smaller (but paved) highway, and then across a 200km long gravel backroad, back to the main highway. I had been driving for about 10 hours at the point and didn't really notice until it told me to turn onto the gravel road. It's pretty much the only time I was afraid I'd be stranded in the middle of nowhere, since I was on about a quarter tank of gas at that point and out of cell service, so I was unsure if going back to the main highway or across the backroad would be closer to a gas station.

In the end I took the backroad and ended up just making it after driving on the "empty tank" light for about 80km (which is surprising how long it lasted!). My fault for zoning out and blindly trusting GPS!

Apple maps always load slow for me in mobile browser, I give up waiting for the map image to load every time.

I often find Apple Maps navigation frustrating. For instance, they don't show which platform a train is leaving from (in London). Knowing that there is a train leaving in 3 minutes somewhere on 15 platform train station isn't helpful.

what alternate reality is this? Google Maps has never stagnated ever. Tons of new features have been added every year since it was first created. Go read the maps blog posts, watch the google i/o videos, or just search for it and you'll see 10s of thousands of articles listing the new features from each year.

It's our lived reality, not the SWE-centric reality. We don't really want new features, we want the existing features to work better. The voice output on Google Maps is simply bad. It calls out turns when there are other available turns before the one you're supposed to take, and doesn't say anything to disambiguate. It draws which lane to be in for your exit but doesn't call it out. It doesn't say what you need to know for compound instructions (e.g., exit followed closely by fork). You must look at the map to be able to follow the instructions. Apple Maps does these things better and that's why we prefer to use it (with screen mirroring to the car).

And yes, we even like the 3D view. It helps provide context faster than the 2D view, even if it doesn't always render the best information. Every product has room for improvement, and Apple Maps has been improving. Google Maps isn't usefully better now than it was in 2015.

The Transit app was infinitely better for public transit last time I used it. This was before the pandemic for me though.

Compare it to the sheer readability of open street maps though, and you realise the vast white spaces next to the yellow lines are full of interesting buildings.

If anyone wants to try it, OrganicMaps on F-droid do a fantastic job delivering raster maps with navigation

Except I find OrganicMaps to have an even worse version of the problems of Google Maps for the exact reason you say it's good. I mostly don't care about all of the "interesting buildings". I care about the one interesting building that I'm trying to get to. Often, I literally cannot get it to show me the business I care about because it's the ground-floor coffee shop in a 10-story office building, and it would rather try to have 40 tiny pins for every legal firm and startup crammed onto the building than show me the ground-floor option that 95% of people would probably want.

I get it - they have no information about me. They maybe don't even have a way to understand or even guess which one I may care about, but in a city with any amount of density you need some fairly strong heuristics on what pins you're showing to filter out the valid businesses that you're unlikely to care about.

It has the most up to date business data for any map provider, and by far, their location/points of interest search is the best, also by far, they have the best satellite images available for "free" and their StreetView integrated map product is way, way ahead of the competition. Which means that, yes, GMaps is the best out there.

For those purposes yes, I can't disagree and use it myself. However often enough I actually want a map to simply orient myself or get a sense of the geography of a place, and for that purpose Google Maps is rather useless.

When you zoom out, everything is just green, no matter if it's actually a forest or not (okay, some areas with agricultural usage have been mapped, but it's far from comprehensive where I live), and when you zoom in everything is just a featureless grey-on-grey, with no way to distinguish between built-up areas and various kinds of open spaces, tree-covered or not. (Only "parks" still get shown in green – and somehow in France Google has decided to include large scale "natural parks" covering hundreds of square kilometres or more in that category, in which case once you zoom in everything in that area is shown on a green background, which is equally useless.)

I’ve found Citymapper to give far more realistic routes and commute times on the NYC subway.

Big issue with Google Maps is that it doesn’t zoom in properly when you are complex turn. Number of times I miss the turn on Google Maps is so high compared to Apple Maps. Apple Maps even integrates with Apple Watch and taps on your wrist to ensure you don’t miss turn. More recently I also found Google Maps is not keeping up with closed roads in real time. Gradually but surely, I have moved on to Apple Maps. I never thought this would happen.

> Finally, Google Maps seems more intent today on showing bars, restaurants, ads, and work-from-home businesses than useful map-related features. Sometimes it doesn’t even show the most basic information anymore, including street names.

I suspect they arrived at this through a series of A-B tests, since the more useful navigational information they display, the easier it is for the user to "learn" a city, and be able to navigate by themselves. So hiding information that allows the user to learn the map layout probably increases usage metrics.

A couple of years ago I noticed I missed precisely that: "learning" the layout of a city when I travel. So I started using Organic Maps, which always shows street names and other useful information to assist me in my navigation, instead of guiding me turn by turn.

Search results are a lot worse than Google Maps, and the routes it picks are also often worse, and it's missing traffic information. But when I'm travelling I'm usually on foot, and I'm there to get lost and discover the place, so it's OK if my route is not as efficient as it could be.

As a rule, when in my home city, I always study the route to a new place before navigating, try to get back home without the GPS (which is usually pretty easy, actually), and, on my second visit, challenge myself to get there without the GPS. After enough of this, I have a strong enough map of the city in my own head that I can plan my own routes, get unlost, and make decisions about alternate routes. I often find that there are easier routes than the one proposed by Google Maps. ("No, I'm not going to try to turn left onto a six-lane divided highway without a light at this hour")

This doesn't apply for me personally, and I think also for most people using public transport. The lack of effort needed for effective transport makes me more likely to use it again, because I don't need to think about uncertainties like delays, roadblocks and timing. I actually end up using Maps for routes I've taken many times before, because of this.

> I suspect they arrived at this through a series of A-B tests

And based on the article, they might be using user frustration as a indicator of success:

> A workaround I’ve stumbled upon whenever this happens is to select a business pin on the next street over. When Google Maps centers on that, it for some reason will label the street I’m standing on.

Like all community and crowdsourced open source projects openstreetmap is taking its time but boy is it beautiful when it crosses a threshold! When outdoors hiking or looking for cultural points of interest in a city trip OSM is the tool to use.

Commercial stuff, as expected, not as well served, which is in a sense a pity. The best way to assist people with their commercial activity is to provide objective information that is not biased by advertising.

Google Maps is actually one of the few Google properties that has not got bad. I appreciate their reviews since they don't have Yelp's problem of extorting businesses.

It's also neat that you can review almost everything in google maps. Wanna leave a review for a cool rock in your neighborhood? Sure! Why not.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Murder+Cove/@57.0310912,-1...

edit: also this one made me chuckle https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tim+Hortons/@82.4982691,-6...

Thanks for that Tim Horton link. I laughed and laughed.

I've felt that Apple Maps has been better than Google Maps in many ways for years now (although I still switch back and forth between them, seemingly at random, for no real reason, using each for about 50% of my map browsing).

Finding street names seems to be a massive issue across all maps -- not just mobile, not just Apple and Google. One of the most important things to me when looking at a map can simply not exist at most zoom levels. Zoom way in, checking at each step? No labels. Zoom way out, checking at each step? No labels. WTF

Apple Maps support for proper lane markings, road features, trees, building outlines etc is so much better. I basically only use Google maps for double checking business hours.

Google maps might mark that a road has a lane, but Apple Maps delineates lane size, has better direction and turn markers, is able to pick up bike lanes, slow zones, speed bumps, the _kind_ of lane markers! (Double line, single, single + dash).

Also the bike routing on Apple Maps is saner too. Google Maps regularly attempts to route me down highways or arterial roads…

Try mapy.cz - https://apps.apple.com/cz/app/mapy-cz-navigation-maps/id4114...

They're based on OSM data, and I generally find them better than Google for street names

You say:

> In the perennial battle between mapping services, there are two main competitors: Google Maps and Apple Maps.

Sorry but for me there is only one: https://www.openstreetmap.org/

And this is my app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.psyberia.o...

ATAK or go home

I’m an iPhone user and I’d pay good money for an OSM based app with these features:

- Hard focus on “general mapping” like Google Maps, so not outdoor trails or sailing or…

- Maps are streamed to my device, also when I zoom in to street level - no requirement to download offline maps first

- Search is working and good enough

- Routing is working and good enough

- Big plus if it does turn by turn navigation, or can kick me into Apple/Google Maps turn by turn with the address I found

- Big plus if I can choose from some map styles

Organic Maps is the closest thing to what you want that I have found. The only thing it doesn't tick off your list is the streamed maps parts, as it's fully offline. It works really well in my experience, I use it frequently while travelling. The only downsides I've found are that it doesn't do real time traffic, and it doesn't seem to do multi lingual search very well. For example, if you are in Barcelona where the local official language is Catalan, and you are trying to search for "Calle Somestreet" in Spanish, it will be expecting you to search for "Carrer de Somestreet" and will show you "Calle Somestreet" in Madrid, for example.

Sadly, search is still far from ideal. Not saying that you should not use it, but rather that reporting problems (such as say https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5251 ) is useful and worth doing. And to not expect search as good as what Google provides, at least for now.

I've recently switched to Organic Maps as a replacement for gmaps. Navigation is offline, it uses OSM for its basemap and points of interest, and you can easily save points (and export them) without needing to login to an account. I also find it easier to use for planning routes for diving or hiking. The only problem is that it doesn't have that nifty terrain view from gmaps or a way to show an aerial satellite view.

OsmAnd is ok as well and offers more layer choices, but it's heavier. Organic Maps is great though to just quickly see where you are for instance. No fuzz, just a map, which is a feature these days, unfortunately.

Yet the thing which I don't really understand in the OP's article is statements like

Many times I just want to see the name of the street I’m standing on

followed by

But for now, I’m stuck with Google Maps

Of course I don't know whether they really think there are no other maps than Google and Apple, but that seems rather far fetched. This seems such a basic 'right tool for the job' thing. You have a computer in your hand, it's still supposed to work for you and not the other way around. And for a lot of things you can actually make it do that, so why wouldn't you?

Mapping has become a commodity. The differences between various maps are increasingly cosmetic (i.e. styling) and now that people can self host openstreetmap through things like protomaps, even cost is no longer a big obstacle. Core map features have almost no value, it's all the stuff people do on top of maps that holds the value.

Honestly Google Maps is fine for what it does but as a search expert I notice that precision and recall metrics aren't great for Google Maps these days. It doesn't find places (recall) I know exist or ranks them so low that you won't find them unless you really look. And it boosts places that (presumably) are paying to get boosted (precision). It's more than a bit manipulative. All that erodes trust. If, I look for restaurants or bars in an area that I know has loads of them, I expect to see all of them; not just a few. This is a problem because it erodes trust and breaks the promise to the user that Google has it all. Once that obviously stops being true, users are free to use competing products.

The question is what they should use. Because a lot of the alternatives aren't much better.

I find that it is often difficult/immpossible to get a sense of scale.

The width and detail of streets is adjusted such that it is not obvious if I'm looking at things a few hundred metres apart, or a few kilometers! And there is no scale indication on the screen! I guess they want a "clean" look but it's not so helpful.

Take a look at Garmin aviation maps. You're offered only a specific set of scales (not an infinitely adjustable range), there is always an indication of scale, and the detail appropriately hints at the scale.

Most maps do that, even print ones. It's not about a "clean look", but about readability. There is also a scale, in the bottom right corner.

My main gripes with Google Maps is that it seems to work OK if you know the name of the place you are looking for, but not its location. But it really doesn't work if you know the location but not the name. If there's any clustering of stores, you can zoom in all you want but it will only show 1 in 2 stores, sometimes even fewer.

Also annoying is the sort order of many searches these days somehow giving you random residential locations at the very top. I suppose these are small webshops ran out of homes for the same search term. But that's rarely what I want to find when I'm using google maps.

Strong recommendation for organic maps on Google.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.organicmap...

It's still OpenStreetMaps, but presented in a much easier mobile app with an experience closer to Google maps than, say, OsmAnd+

Google continues it's enshittification and this was one of the last things I started migrating due to reasons very similar to the article... The usefulness of Google maps has declined significantly.

Organic maps (streets, utilities and businesses) coupled with something like Citymapper (public transport routing) and Waze (car navigation) offer a far better experience than Google maps ever attained in the UK.

Google Maps just isn't a map. I wonder if the people that work on it have ever looked at actual maps before. You have to zoom in almost to the maximum setting to see street names, and even then they often don't show up. Real maps show street names labeled on every street. But Google Maps developers are obviously more interested in it looking 'clean' and in showing little ads all over it than in it actually being useful.

>Real maps show street names labeled on every street

In your locality. Not all places have street names.

> Real maps show street names labeled on every street.

You are specifically describing street maps. There are other sorts of maps, even maps for areas with named streets where the streets are not named on the map.

A local orientation organization has checkpoints around many areas here in Sweden. You visit each one and tally up how many places you've visited. The web site lets you enter the 1- or 2-digit code for each checkpoint if you want to track it that way.

Here's my local map: https://koncept.orientering.se/provapaaktiviteter/hittaut/tr...

There are no street names on those streets. There are contour lines, making it a topographic map.

Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topographic_map and you'll see other examples of topographic maps showing streets but not listing all or even most of the street names.

Did you consider that maybe huge majority of users don't actually use Google Maps as a paper map and don't particularly care for using it that way?

I didn't say anything about using it 'as a paper map'. But using it as a map is the point of a map.

Eyesore issues are an aside to the reckless behavior of GMaps' navigation. I don't want to always take a one lane back-country road to save maybe 5 minutes of my life - and if there's no suggested alternative route at the onset there's not really an easy way to compare the times between usual("fastest") and "safest" routes.

Also that 'feature' where it suddenly wants to completely change my route to 'a faster route' unless I interact with the UI in a time pressure WHILE I'M DRIVING or on a motorcycle. And that's the default setting!!! Who thought that was OK?

When I lived in Saigon, it was very hard to remember where places were. Either due to the map not having accurate information, or it being in Vietnamese and I just couldn't read it.

So, I started to pin/label every place I went that I had a good experience at. It is a very big city of about 12m+ people, and I really explored pretty much all of it by motorbike late at night when I couldn't sleep. It was a lot of pins, 1000's.

My map got so cluttered with pins that I couldn't find anything anymore without zooming in super far. Even worse, removing pins is a painful multi step process. The search process on the map, via pins is also pretty useless.

I'm not sure what to do now, so I just left all the pins and moved out of the country during covid. One day, I'll go back, but I'm truly afraid to deal with things being completely out of date now.

Some locals in Brisbane succeeded in getting a brief historical name for the central business district ("Frogs Hollow") boosted up as a locality name which shows up in several zoom levels. It's more prominent than the real name of the location (Gardens Point) sometimes.

Nobody appears able to get this rescinded. Either its being contested, or the process boundaries on "this is graffiti") are limiting. I do quite a lot of maps related input, I don't claim to be high status but I am sure I would have multi year searchable "is a bona fide person" status.

Sure, I get it: it's funny. Once. It's really annoying explaining to visitors that its not actually a common name, not used, won't work with Uber or any other mechanistic "where is..." approach with real people.

There's an entire fake park in my old neighborhood on Gmaps. I reported it ages ago and it's still there for no reason at all.

I'd make the "somebody is going to get killed" remark but it's already been made.

Maybe it's a "trap" park to catch people copying Google Maps data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

I can't actually see it anymore at any zoom level on mobile or desktop. Maybe somebody finally did fix it (or maybe on a different sized screen or something it would still show?)... You can still search for it though.

Phew! the licenced bar which named itself "frogs hollow saloon" isn't a problem, its just the common or garden maps graffiti the article complains about!

(amazed it's gone. Thanks for pointing it out)

Google Maps creating new neighborhood names has been such a problem that it got a New York Times article: "As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume" (2018). One example: Google Maps renamed San Francisco's SoMa neighbor (South of Market) to the "East Cut".

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/technology/google-maps-ne...

A funny thing about Google Maps in Brisbane is that the satellite/3D map was from 2010 last I looked, but the image copyrights all say 2023.

(But just checked again and they refreshed it finally.)

Google maps are terrible. My list of claims: 0) Outdated 1) Not only street names are not shown, local businesses too! My typical use case: I want to check working hours. Expected - zoom to the address, tap on the icon and here it is. Reality - sometimes no matter how I zoom - icon not shown, I had to search store name, it zooms out to the whole city, zoom again and only now it can be seen! 2) Search is too exact, opposite to the main google search. When I enter “flowers” it shows me only businesses with flowers in the name but not all the flower shops around. 3) Several weeks ago they broke public transport navigation in my city. Public transport was not great before (it was absolutely wrong about timings and) but now it is gone completely.

The lack of street names unless you hit the zoom level just right (or seemingly never) reinforces the adage that systems focus on perpetuating themselves not providing the service they were built for.

>In the perennial battle between mapping services, there are two main competitors: Google Maps and Apple Maps.

Seriously? What about Bing? What about the entire segment of the mapping app market for drivers like NaviExpert or Yanosik. Finally, what about OpenStreetMap?

I didn’t realize Bing had a map app, and I’ve never heard of NaviExpert of Yanosik. Granted, sample size of 1 (actually a half dozen or so—my immediate family haven’t heard of these either).

Nobody uses Bing, which is just another combination of TomTom and OSM like old Apple Maps was.

(You can tell nobody used it because it was just as bad as old Apple Maps but nobody complained about it.)

Their only appeal is they sometimes license nicer satellite images than other people.

If you are looking for an alternative navigation app I can recommend giving Magic Earth a try. Simple, clear and free. Nice developers that answers your mail. It even supports Android Auto.

https://www.magicearth.com

Is this app only available in the US app store or something? I tried on my iOS device here in Australia, and a whole heap of other mapping apps are appearing in search results instead, when the query string is "magic earth". iOS App Store is even autocompleting to "magic earth navigation & apps" but no Magic Earth app appears in the results.

Don't know about Australia. It's available in Sweden though, so it's not only for US.

I don't think this is "free" in the software sense.

Well, sure. Free as in freeware, gratis, no charge. I haven't seen any ads either.

My biggest issue with Google Maps is that when it decides it wants to reroute me, it is absurdly aggressive. "Here is a faster route, if you don't take your eyes off the highway, turn on your phone screen, and click this button in the next 5 seconds you will be rerouted". Half the time it reroutes me off a highway to take a series of turns in a location I am unfamiliar, or it takes me onto a highway that I dread driving on (I4 here in Central FL), or it takes me to a toll road that I guess it doesn't realize is a toll road. Even if you do hit "Don't reroute for a potential 2 minute time savings", it will just try again in 2 more minutes.

Like dude, I picked the route when I started this thing, go fuck yourself. Clicking buttons on touchscreens while hurling a thousand pounds of steel around at 80 miles an hour is what kills people.

And another thing since I'm ranting, if I have do-not-disturb turned on, don't fucking pause my Spotify and play a phone call ringtone through my speakers. If the person calling me is having an emergency they should have called 911, it can wait.

As I am as frustrated as you, there's no alternative unfortunately. Although Apple Maps are nice, they aren't that up to date as Google's in eastern Europe :(

When I was at TomTom, they ran a contest for employees to come up with fun ways to gamify their internet-connected GPS Personal Navigation Devices.

Some wise guy came up with the brilliant idea of maintaining a real-time "Top 10 Speeders" leaderboard for every single road on the entire map. Kinda like Foursquare for speeding on local roads. No matter where you were driving in the world, you could instantly see the top ten speeds of other TomTom users who drove down that same stretch of road, and put the pedal to the metal to claim or defend your own spot on the leaderboard!

That one went over like a lead balloon with the legal department.

The only thing worse would be a chat app for texting while driving above the speed limit with other Leaderboard members along the same stretch of road.

They also didn't appreciate my proposal for TomTomagotchi: a simulated personality on your PND that relentlessly begs you to drive it all around town to various interesting places it wants to visit, to improve its mood and satisfy its cravings. (Kind of like having virtual kids!) I'm sure there's a revenue model having drive through Burger Kings and car washes pay for placements.

I really want to know why Google maps is slow on a $3500 laptop with a huge Nvidia card.

Its probably using the IGP for the browser, unless you run an external monitor.

You can check with the Nvidia activity monitor.

Maps is mostly going to be CPU bound though.

What do you mean by "slow"? I'm on a standard M1 Pro Macbook, and don't seem to have any issues?

I have an older computer and it's a dog. Other maps are somehow not dogs.

Works fine for me on two laptops, one that sounds similar to yours, and one that's just a Dell with Intel graphics. Both run Linux.

Maybe it's your OS or browser?

There's a streetsign in a small country town in NSW "ignore google maps" which is a reflection of how strongly mistaken belief about route-finding can require locals to act. (this is not a piece of cardboard, its a full on enamel finish legit sign. The road is a giant U-turn and the road above which it APPEARS on maps to connect to, cannot be reached.

I wouldn't be surprised if pretty much every economy has one.

Here is one on Sardinia ("do not follow the directions suggested by Google maps" and "4x4 only") from 2019 : https://edition.cnn.com/travel/gallery/baunei-google-maps-si...

"Disregard GPS instruction to proceed further" in the NJ pine barrens from 2019: https://forums.njpinebarrens.com/threads/in-the-blazing-hot-...

Plus a number which warn off larger vehicles, like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-ford-do-not-follow-sat-nav... and https://innway.blogspot.com/2012/11/do-not-follow-sat-nav-ju... . Both are from 10 years ago so hopefully things have gotten better.

Still happens though. https://www.herefordtimes.com/news/23399093.plea-google-satn... is from earlier this year, complaining about satnav sending people between Ruxton Green, Ross-on-Wye HR9 6EJ, UK and Llangarron, Ross-on-Wye, UK. Though they were going to "ask Google Maps to remove the road from their data", compared to a 2016 solution where Lyonshall Parish Council 'decided to try supplementing the existing sign with their own large red road sign reading 'HGV drivers - ignore satnav - you will get stuck!'

Google Street View shows some very narrow roads, with a last visit date of 2011.

My beef with Maps is the UI. It's so skittish and modal I'm constantly fighting with it.

If I position the viewport ans run a query, it unhelpfully searches a different area. If I tap on a pin it moves the viewport again. If I dismiss the pin info it moves yet again to an arbitrary position. Same for a while other bunch of interactions.

It feels like a UX that thinks it's clever but doesn't respect me as the user.

I find it funny that this site is speaking about others, but itself is worse: you just can't see the contents of the article, which is laying behind 4 layers of ads, including a video and a half-screen-high banner.

There are alternatives for mapping apps, but no competitors for street view and discovering local photos (if you need a map/streetview for NY or SF it doesn’t matter what you use). True, even photos has become “spammy” in contested areas. But is indispensable if you want to discover local areas in regions like Turkmenistan for example

Around 2 years ago while working on a geolocation project I researched a few alternative services to cover our reverse lookup needs (coordinates to address).

The difference in quality of data for the above mentioned process between MapQuest and Google, and then Google and OSM, was quite telling. Everyone who read the resulting report was also puzzled.

OSM was about 80% accurate, Google was about 90%, and MapQuest was over 98%. Also worth mentioning is that only two of these sources let you store the data (Mapquest and OSM). Someone else on my team wanted to use Canada Post's geolocation data. Do not. It is extremely bad.

We ended up running a service off MapQuest for advertising by mail using data from web traffic. The mailed letter or advertisement could be in the mailbox by the next day.

The UX over the same period has gotten noticeably worse. The embedded maps that use two fingers to move around the map is my favorite UX decision of all time...

https://archive.is/os2JU (link without unclosable eyesore autoplaying video. Talk about irony)

I wanted to read more but the webpage is 1/3 auto play mustard video ad with a shrink (not close) button so small I tapped the ad instead. Fastcompany has become an eyesore.

What I don't understand is where there seem to be two versions of google maps. Sometimes I can get streetview, but if I access it about half the time I can't.

I feel there are a number of "modes", or, I don't know, "levels" maybe, that offer different features and are not intuitive (for me). I think a long time ago, you were either on the map, or you were in navigation, or you were in Street View. But now I get the impression that there's steps in between, like: you have maybe soft-selected a route, but you're not quite in navigation mode, yet you're unable to drop a pin somewhere else, so you have to go back without knowing how many steps exactly, that sort of funny business.

There are two web versions of Google Maps. There's the horrible one that you can reach from the search results page if you made a specifically commercial-local request, like [1]. There is the same thing on proper Google Maps[2].

1: https://www.google.com/search?sa=X&tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:9&tbm=lcl&...

2: https://www.google.com/maps/search/lunch+downtown+berkeley/@...

Every time I encounter the first version I'm dumbfounded that it still exists.

Its nerfed features make for such a frustrating user experience. I can't think of a reason for it to exist as its own thing. I'd love to know the rationale.

I believe the reason is it loads faster.

As so oftrn it's legal. For snti-competition reasons Google is not allowed to hotline Google Maps as first result on the search page.

> Whenever I’m in a major metropolitan area, Google Maps seems to have an obsession with displaying as many hotels, bars, and clubs on the map as it can. This happens even when I haven’t searched for a single hotel or bar.

All this data they slurp up about me, and they can't even figure out that I checked into my hotel and slept in it last night, and am probably not looking for another nearby hotel today. Or that I never go to nightclubs, and probably won't be going to one today either. They say they collect data to improve their products, not just to sell it to advertisers. I believe they sell it to advertisers, I'm starting to suspect they don't use it to make better products at all.

This is why I think google sucks at AI and is just BSing. If they actually had decent AI, they’d know this stuff and customize the experience.

Some cynically think they know and are just money grubbers. But I think they don’t know, because it’s hard. And there’s no motivation for them to know.

This article is mainly about ads popping up, but I think their whole UI is also worth shitting on. Really as an organization, Google doesn't seem to have any good-looking UIs. They're all ugly, awkward and inefficient. Clicking on a pin on Google Maps takes up an enormous portion of the screen for no reason. My Gmail page uses the top half to list pages of emails and the bottom half for absolutely nothing, and there is a huge space at the top outlined by an ugly 1-pixel rounded border that says something I won't ever care to read. The Google Search results page looks like it was just what they used for testing and then never created the actual UI.

In Berlin, Google Maps shows bike share and scooter clusters on the same layer as public transport. Searching for a bus or tram stop with all that noise is punishing. Also the icons for the bus and bike are very similar at the default zoom level. You have to zoom in constantly to differentiate and inevitably it's a marker for Donkey Republic or nextbike, instead of the bus. They don't even mark actual docking stations. It's just sidewalk areas. I assume those companies had access to a bulk map update API and just claimed spots all over the city. The result is a mess.

One thing I absolutely hate about Google Maps is you can't do text search for buildings/businesses with "hotel" or "inn" specifically in the name, it'll jack that search and show you its special hotels interface in an attempt to sell you rooms.

Also there's no way to look up "serviced apartments" specifically, it's an actual category, but that also gets used as an excuse to load the hotels interface.

The interface basically hides totally valid hotels that don't necessarily have an online presence but their name/category is on the map.

Fast company along inc.com are among the worst offenders on invasive ads. Anytime I hit a amp link I can't block ads the first thing I do is open actual url. Autoplay video should be ilegal. I get these publications (similar to Google maps) are huge costs centers but please be self aware on your criticism.

Yeah, maps is not as minimal as it used to be and maybe it will die as it is due to inexistent business model but my clutter of personal pins - at the moment - is competing with ads, so unless I zoom in I barely see any ads.

I used to live by Google Maps for several years, until I moved to China. I knew it'd be worse than other options, but I really didn't expect the gap to be so gargantuan. And I also felt like the move exposed a lot more of some of the problems brought up in the article and comments.

To be sure I wasn't remembering things wrongly, I just opened it up and confirmed that the points below still stand today.

- There are insane amounts of businesses shown/advertised on Maps, even though Google doesn't have a presence in mainland China. I can confirm that lots of them are correct, as I pass by them frequently. There are many that are outdated, as in Maps showing a given business at location X, but the place has become something else. This is most likely due to Google being unable to update the information in a timely fashion so I don't really blame them, but still adds to the app being considerably less useful.

- It cannot show public transport information, even though it says it can. This makes the app completely useless for me, and I'd believe for most others here, as I think foreigners are more likely to try using it than Chinese people, and it is a lot less common for foreigners to drive here.

- Even with a VPN on, it still cannot find most information about anything. Even some driving/walking directions seem wrong.

Conversely, Apple Maps actually does as well here for me as Google Maps did before I moved to this country. The funnier part of that is how it feels like Apple only cares about the US in regards to Maps data and features, but it does a pretty good job here. No fancy stuff like 3D mapping, look inside, etc, but I can count on one hand the number of times Apple Maps messed up in the several years I've been here.

For your first pain point, have you taken into account that China mandates that Google maps deliberately obscure exact locations by being off as much to several hundred meters? If you look at road crossings from Hong Kong to mainland, you'll notice that sometimes the bridges seem to drop straight into the water.

That could be related, yes. But most of the businesses I recognize are placed close to where they actually are/were, however a lot of them are now different businesses. I think it's due to Google being unable to update it because they don't have a presence in the country.

Also a likely explanation, yes.

Google Maps has been broken on Firefox for many months. Not sure if it's my personal setup, or some addon, but on every Firefox instance I have, the search is entirely broken - it won't return any results.

I've since switched over to openstreetmap.org for most of my use. It's absolutely not perfect, the search is not as powerful as Google when it comes to recognizing typos or what I'm looking for, but the actual street data is really, really good, and the map view is very uncluttered.

>but on every Firefox instance I have, the search is entirely broken - it won't return any results.

Works fine for me, with uBO and a bunch of other extensions installed. You might want to try disabling all your extensions and then re-enabling them one-by-one.

I had the same issue where even zooming was jittery and there was no StreetView, for some reason a Firefox profile reset fixed the issue. So I don't know if Google is intentionally breaking it or what.

I strongly recommend MAPS.ME as a great alternative to Google Maps. It comes with offline navigation and it's less cluttered than Gmaps. not sure if it's built around Gmaps API, I don't know much about that but it's nice to use.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapswithme...

Organic Maps is a fork of Maps.me from before they started to make it worse.

https://organicmaps.app/

Entropy or corporate greed and mismanagement - don't know. But Google is in a slow process to become a Yahoo! or Yelp it seems across all its properties.

The irony of fast company complaining about Google maps being an eyesore while their mobile website is an ad-ridden hellscape is disgustingly poetic.

I recently was browsing a university neighborhood on Google Maps, and a large condo building had a pin in it... for a bed bug extermination service.

I don't know whether the business owner lived there, or an opportunistic business unrelated to the location was just using it to advertise in college (i.e., bed bug) neighborhood, or it was sabotage by someone who wanted to depress market value of the building, or something else.

Also regarding possibly rigging Google Maps for marketing... I've also seen a real small business's listing on Google Maps be edited to say that they'd gone out of business. I told them, by walking into their store that was still in-business, and they definitely hadn't done that edit themselves. They were in a niche serving students, and the timing was just as the new students arrived, so I'd guess this edit resulted in some other business locking in some customers who found a business and won't look for a new one for the next few years.

> I don't know whether the business owner lived there

This is almost always the reason. Either they're a mobile business or their data source picked up the business owner's address rather than the business address from the local government DB.

Google's slow decline of enshittification... soon it'll be ads during navigation, "rerouting... on your left is Burger King, your number one craving fix. Make it your way with tasty fried spice crisps..."

We could create such nice things as a species, sad our tech seems to so often devolve into desperate greedy crap.

I switched to Apple maps awhile ago now.

I just find that the UI is nicer to use and look at and it seems to be more performant and smoother.

I haven't really had any problems getting to where I need to go using Apple Maps. Maybe it doesn't work well in some countries and places, but it seems to work perfectly fine where I need it to.

Czech Republic is one of the few countries where Google has a meaningful local competitor, Seznam, for it's major services and maps is the service where I'm most glad for that. All the shortcomings from the article are so much more obvious and painful when you have an alternative that does it right. I wondered for a long time how Google can have such a bad product, like I literally can't recognize a place I know perfectly on the screen so I need to "search" for it so Google zooms into some indistinctive bland colored area for me. And I've realized that's exactly the point, that's the prime example of enshitification. Tool that works so bad that you think you need it more. I'm so glad for mapy.cz and that statement from the article, that I can choose only Google or Apple maps, is not true for me.

Navigation in cities has also started to become a problem in the last decade, as more and more cities try to reduce car traffic

E.g., there's a "no car" street near me where the access restrictions are not on Google Maps. I've submitted the changes a month ago, to no avail. I resubmitted a week ago, as I could not find any trace of my reports.

The restrictions can be seen on the past 3+ years of Streetview footage... There are rumours the restrictions have been correctly mapped, but subsequently removed due to telemetry data (cars frequently drive there anyways, as there's no enforcement and also a lot of crappy navigation systems from Here Maps :) )

Apple Maps and OSM have them, the former finally getting it right after they rolled out their own maps. There's no excuse when it's public data in the Road Authority database...

I've noticed gmaps has stopped providing optimal routes when navigating. Just yesterday I was driving to the airport and it showed me a very unusual route which it has never recommended before, the time to destination was 1h30min. It was strange because the usual route doesn't usually have traffic, so I decided to take the usual route instead. The time dropped to 1h10min. For the rest of the route it kept showing me unusual routes and I kept ignoring it taking the usual route instead.

At one point it started showing time to destination at 1h50min. It took me 1h and I had to ignore the gmaps at least 5 times until there was no alternate route available.

My current way of using Google maps is to use it for searching and localization and then use what I call a "real" map app afterwards. I.e. on mobile I will use Guru Maps or on my desktop I'll use some version of Open Street Maps.

My main issue with Google maps is that it isn't really a mapping application anymore; it's a navigation application. It's not really suited to being used as a map (e.g. it jumps around randomly, it hides road names, etc.) and instead focuses on showing you how to get somewhere assuming you're basically a robot following their instructions (e.g. navigation while driving). That's fine and all, but really isn't what I want out of a mapping application. I'd choose a paper map any day over Google maps.

Well, Maps is as much ado about Mapping, as Smart Phones about Phoning, or social networks about socializing etc. Most popular apps/services are about forming a community around "X" subject, with the aim of selling/advertising services around "X,Y,Z"

From experience, I know many people & businesses that use maps mostly for Business Intelligence, if you're Renting property of Buying property/businesses/real estate, Google maps has data up to 2008 (street view). Couple that with Satellite data, reviews, user-generated photos etc, and you've got a treasure trove.

Yes, the map UI is "busy" but I think we've evolved as users too. All google need to do now is work a way to Verify/Trust info around Pins/Comments etc, and they've revenue sorted.

Trying out Organic Maps, I noticed two big things:

1. Man, this UI is so much faster than Google Maps.

2. Man, this has trouble finding addresses.

Hopefully they improve with time.

On my older laptop at home, Google Maps is horribly sluggish compared to just about any other map product.

> 2. Man, this has trouble finding addresses.

If you are or someone else is interested one can:

- add addresses to OpenStreetMap if missing (highly welcome!)

- report search problems to https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues

- or even submit fixes if they want

- wait till someone else will do any of above (to be clear, that is also OK to do this - noone is obligated to volunteer for above)

- I guess you can also donate to Organic Maps and/or OpenStreetMap Foundation but impact will be less direct

For sure. I've added hundreds of addresses myself. But still there's work to do.

Big thanks for help then!

On top of that, the route planing with all those green routes now just sucks, unless one is paying attention to what is being proposed.

No Google, I don't want to drive through a farmer field road only usable by tractors to shorten my ride in a couple of minutes in a more environment friendly way.

Is this inevitable, though? How many PMs and directors and ambitious engineers does Google Maps hire? If a company puts someone in a role, that person will do everything to make something happen, right? As for Google Maps, that means more and more features will show up on the maps.

In a general setting, I have found two interesting aspect to how and why software gets developed.

Most of the products reach their inherent feature maturity (a toaster just needs to toast and eject) and beyond that much isn't needed by the end users (a digital temp display, Bluetooth connectivity with notifications to mobile app when toast is ready and such) but rather gets developed either:

Because Product manager has to show and prove his/her worth to the higher ups OR the backlog should be full and the team MUST NOT sit idle.

In my observation - some 60% of the written software comes from above and that ranks far higher than any critically necessary technical debt no matter what unless software comes to a grinding halt.

All of these criticisms are very valid, especially the street name one, which is a great example of core functionality being sacrificed to...whatever this is. But then the end:

And as annoyed as I am by all those unwanted pins on my screen, I still often need some of those points of interest, such as popular times, live foot traffic data, reviews, photos, and other useful data that help me plan an outing. It’s nice to know peak wait times for a restaurant and how long customers typically spend there.

Nonsensical. This is smartphone as pacifier for people who can't tolerate any uncertainty or figuring anything out the hard way. It's such a bd excuse I feel like the editor made the writer add it.

You really can’t conceive that this stuff might be useful information to someone who isn’t exactly you?

Seriously, how arrogant is that?

Maps worked great for their primary purpose of finding your way to some designated location for hundreds of years without built-in analytics and marketing info. When the latter is getting in the way of the core function (eg finding out what street you're on), something has gone badly wrong. Lately Google maps won't show your own location if you have Google location services disabled, even though pretty much every phone has a GPS built in. The map is no longer the product, data about what you're doing is the product.

Funny to see that the pins are the author's biggest problem with Google Maps.

Google seems to have started using some kind of automation to generate maps several years ago and quality just went to utter shit. In my city, there are buildings that overlap a river. They're there since at least 2020 and no one tried to fix that. When I traveled to Dubai this spring, it was even worse — only the streets on Google Maps somewhat matched reality, but buildings were some arbitrary shapes strewn around.

This kind of product quality is something that I'd be too shy to show to an office janitor, yet Google — a multi-billion-dollar company — somehow deemed it appropriate to ship this abomination to production.

FTA

> But as much as I’d like to abandon Google Maps for the increasingly more user-friendly Apple Maps, I can’t.

OpenStreetMaps is the only service I use nowadays. Google Maps does not even show secondary or tertiary roads, it's just ad after ad in a color vomit screen.

> Why won't you show me the street name?

This, beyond anything else, is the main reason I use Apple Maps: if I'm not actively in a navigation mode, then 99.9% of the time I'm looking for cross-streets.

Apple Maps is also not perfect about this (you still need to pinch-and-zoom sometimes to get it to show the street), but it behaves far more consistently than Google Maps in this regard.

The only reason I have Google Maps still installed is because they have all of my pins; once I stop being lazy and figure out how to export those, I'll be only too glad to delete it permanently.

What a weird article, first it complains for a long time about PoI information being in the way and then concludes that the author is stuck with google maps because it is the only one with PoI information.

I tried using OSM. I could not figure out something as simple as searching an address.

I avoid google with passion. Ive been able to get off chrome, gmail, GCP, but getting off maps is next level frustrating.

I've fully bought into Apple ecosystem but I refuse to use Apple Maps. Not sure how good they are in US but in Europe they are dismal. When they announced the release re-designed maps in Netherlands I gave them a shot but it honestly wasn't a big improvement. I took a screen of my area in Google Maps and the same screen using Apple Maps and the side-by-side difference was shocking. Google maps had orders of magnitude more detailed and precise topography, cycling paths, canals, traffic etc.

Once I was directed my Google Maps in Germany leading to a closed entrance of a highway. I passed that entrance and Google rerouted me, after driving for some time apparently I went through a big loop and go back to the same entrance. Then I drove off to the other direction, somehow I went back to the same entrance again, passing through a certain road that we already remembered from the last loop in the opposite direction.

We wasted what feels like an hour, but probably around half? And then we changed to Apple Maps which has the data on the closure and we can get on the right road on the first try.

I was once in a new rental Skoda (using Here maps), that tried to make me cross a river on a bridge that was never built (I looked it up afterward, the project was abandoned). Google Maps saved the day...

“Google Maps has become an eyesore” https://i.imgur.com/DeLj7vh.png

It's even worse than just an eyesore. I live in Canada but on a recent trip to Denver GMap deliberately and repeatedly tried to make me catch an Uber from the airport to a train station close to the city centre, in spite of large signs in the airport that directed me to the train that would take me directly downtown (which I did after concluding that Google was deceiving me in order to make a cut from Uber). The experience was identical for a friend on an iPhone.

I use a really old modded version (~6.xx) of Maps on Android (and latest version too). It lacks many features but has a very cleaner look for navigation.

Is anyone using a relatively new modded version? If so, please link to it

The one I use: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/app-mod-good-old-google-m...

The example in the article shows the San Francisco Hilton, with a big ad. They're going out of business.[1] (Hilton Hotels hasn't been a real hotel company in years, anyway. It's just a franchise name now, like RCA.)

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/park-hotels-leaving-san-francis...

> It's just a franchise name now, like RCA.

If it has a points system and co-branded credit card it's real enough.

The thing that annoys me most is people listing their run-from-home business on the map.

This is explicitly against Google's TOS but they don't stop people putting them on.

You can flag them, and Google do remove them. Scan your neighborhood, click any business which is clearly actually a house, click Suggest an Edit > Close or Remove > Not open to the public.

I've had a lot of success removing a whole ton of spammy junk from the map this way.

The reason I uninstalled google maps is because it would open in a random place not related to me (I live in Europe and it opens in Tucson,AZ,USA).

AppleMaps is a great map and even better for guiding directions, but their servers are extremely slow so it is very annoying to browse.

I can't recommend MAPS.ME enough. It's an iOS app based on OpenStreetMap. The amount of details is overwhelming, compared to Google Maps or Apple Maps.

I heavily recommend you switch to https://organicmaps.app/, a privacy-focused, open-source fork of Maps.me, not by a payment processor.

The street name thing is maddening with Apple Maps as well. I can never figure out how to find, for example, the name of the street before my intended turn.

Another bad experience on Google Maps on iOS, that both my wife and I have experienced on two totally different iPhones: if you zoom in, half the time it will glitch out and jump somewhere else totally random on the map. Literally just the pinch zooming in functionality has been broken on iOS for a year or more.

Unfortunately, it is an amateur app made by amateur devs.

I understand most of these problems are the undesirable consequences of Google Maps trying to make money. But there’s no excuse for the ones that are just bad UX, like the zoom level or location changing when searching “food” at a given place, or how it’s impossible to search “smash burgers” if there’s a business called smash somewhere around

have they even looked at their own site? people need some self awareness

My main pet peeve is how you cannot hide major roads from Google Maps, but there's no way to show trains and most public transit without clicking on a station. Even on a large city like London half the public transit is invisible.

What alternatives are there? I'm trying to use OSM, but I find it to complicated and time-consuming to do anything.

At least twice in the past 6 months, Google Maps navigation has taken me down a road or exit or that is closed. And not just temporarily closed for an event or something, but closed construction for multiple weeks or months. And there is no obvious way to report the closure in the app (I'm using the Android version).

Google Maps is fundamentally a commercial map layer. I use google maps to find commercial places - shops, restaurants and hotels! I use OsmAnd to follow forest paths and follow roads (to some extent - google maps has live traffic info, which is sometimes useful). OsmAnd can route you even if you are offline with only GPS signal.

>In the perennial battle between mapping services, there are two main competitors: Google Maps and Apple Maps

Wow, straight out of the gate they're jumping to conclusions. I can think of a dozen "mapping services" that are free for personal use. Each has a particular strength and use-case.

> Why won’t you show me the street name?

This is my biggest gripe. I get the annoying ad stuff, it is a free service after all. But why do I have to scroll and pinch zoom for 2min trying to find a streetname? And sometimes it just doesnt show up.

Isn't that the most important part of a map?

The only technical advantage that Google maps retains in any way is having good imagery. The rest of it (and by that I mean not only maps but the entirety of Google) is built on a fundamentally broken social contract between the products and the users.

> The square pins you see in Google Maps are ad pins. They represent a place of business (a hotel, spa, etc.) that is paying Google to make sure it’s displayed on the map, despite the business’s irrelevance to me.

That summarizes what Google is quite well.

I just came home from driving and using Google Maps and not only it has become an eyesore, it also has become a resource hog. Can’t count how many times it freezes during intermittent mobile signal.

Also the directions are not accurate and updated anymore.

In a way, the enshittification is impressive to behold. The moment competing empires prop up there "giants" all ilusion o free enterprise competing for customers falls apart, leaving us this. I wonder how bad it can get..

Turning off _all_ notifications and Google Maps on Android is pretty okay, except that unnecessary "Latest in..." bottom sheet that takes up space. Wish I could disable that.

And that it's an absolute battery drainer when using GPS navigation.

... this article is published on a website that shows me a "Would you eat mustard Skittles?" autoplay video 5 seconds after I started reading the article.

I can pause the video, but can not close it. It remains at the bottom of the page. Wow.

On work-from-home businesses that are not open to the public: you can report these, and it seems that if you have a good track record of submitting corrections to Google Maps, your reports are handled fairly swiftly.

I don't use Google maps over 4 years. Mapy.cz is enough for me and I do recommend to use it. It support offline maps, no account, detailed hiking routes... Even more accurate than Google has.

I feel bad for all those hotels and businesses that pay for you to see them. I assume that google shows me stuff because people pay them. There’s no way they think I want to see McDonald’s locations on my map.

If you want to find major points of interest, then just use Wikishoot-me:

https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/

I've commented on this before[1] as have others[2] but Google Maps is willfully malicious software that I am certain has killed cyclists and motorcyclists by re-routing onto dangerous routes after navigation has started. Why this dangerous 'feature' cannot be disabled is infuriating.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31333754

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

As a somewhat new commuting cyclist, I've been apps built on top of OpenStreetMap, like OSMAnd. I hear good things about Komoot as well.

Also, as a cyclist and a bit of nerd, it's fun to update OSM around my bike routes I know best.

Osmand should be on every single phone. It works when nothing else does including your cell connection. It's saved my butt a dozen times at this point.

I've been using on this trip to Norway and the detail is excellent.

(That said, the only place I found, including undersea tunnels, that I didn't get signal was in the lower car hold of the ferry. This place has infrastructure.)

I use it back home to label businesses and add other points to the map.

Organic Maps uses OSM data offline and is a little friendlier.

I use it daily. Is become my default maps app, for over two years now

https://info.2gis.com/ has the best maps app in the world. Unfortunately only in Russia.

what's the best map viewer for openstreetmap data that's in the main debian repository? it's okay if it requires me to run a local web server and point a browser at it

"Get the latest from Fast Company Click Sign Up then Allow for Notifications"

A popup blocks, as I continue past the gazillion ads to read about an article that complains about ads.

Lack of street names and even house numbers in gmaps is the worst. OSM is getting better and better though I primarily use it for navigation, with gmaps to search for poi.

Ah yes, let’s read about this “eyesore” https://imgur.io/ZNFLc3y.jpg

Also: it automatically turning on eco trips without asking you.

I had to turn it off twice. It was taking me these horrible windy hilly directions when I should have been on the highway.

Google had/has some useful apps but almost all are filled of junk while collecting and selling your data. Google represents the enshittification of the Internet.

Google and Alphabet and all of its services including on Android have been slowly turning into a buggy counter-intuitive mess for the last several years.

In my recent trips I have found Google Maps and related reviews much more effective than Tripadvison for discovering and choosing where to eat.

But the world is an eyesore. The map represents the territory. Google maps might be becoming ugly, but it's still phenomenally useful.

I miss the original NASA World Wind (back when Google Earth was also a free desktop application). We've fallen a long way, baby.

This article is completely fucking unreadable on mobile. Half the page is taken up by a banner ad an unminimizable autoplay video.

I'd like to recommend the Czech mapy.cz for Europe. It is generally much better and contains fewer translation errors.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is a precursor to offering Maps Premium. Just as with YouTube, UX is obnoxious unless you pay.

Fastcompany plays unrelated commercial over the article.

Not sure how they can peddle that headline without seeing their own efforts in the argument.

Maps and Waze after acquisition have just been stagnating for years. The voice quality is so bad idk how anyone can stand it.

I just wanna say how ironic it is that this website has an ugly banner covering half of my screen (mobile).

A more insidious failure is how google maps does not always show local businesses. When I lived in another city I would search for "tacos" and I would get Taco Bell. Never mind there were five local places that serve tacos nearby. These were not deprioritized, they were never listed. Search for them directly and they come up. But broad search.... you realize that the yellow pages app is actually better at a comprehensive list of businesses.

Missing basic features like "No highways" and minimum overpass height in directions.

Google maps destroys session after I open it again on iOS. This is clusterfuck of UX

The video that autoplays on this website is infuriating.

Glass houses etc. The site hosting the article is awful.

Love Apple Maps. It has progressively gotten so much better and awesome. I don’t think I ever use my iPhone and get frustrated. Leaving android in 2015 was the best decision I made.

I often open Apple Maps and google maps in the same location, just for fun. Google Maps is sinfully ugly and cluttered now in comparison. Whatever the merits or demerits of Material Design are, its cleanliness and elegance hasn’t made it down to Google Naps. And while I’d grant that maps is a hard problem to solve, Apple’s example has been out there for a bit now.

Apple Maps has a good UI and bad data. Their problem is the same problem people face when anyone tries to unseat an incumbent platform: they don't have the audience, so people don't contribute to their knowledge base. Apple Maps shows an Indian restaurant in my neighborhood as open on Saturdays, but they haven't been open on Saturdays in years. They didn't even update their hours on their own website, but the hours are correct on Google Maps. Why? Because business owners maintain their info on Google Maps, because it reaches their customers. And the customers do their own editing of business data as well. So Apple is stuck at a point with not enough users to edit the data, and they are either not climbing out of that rut or they are climbing out very slowly.

Perhaps Apple users do not feel inclined to edit the data. It may be a difference in attitude.

I just compared for my town. Popular cafe on Google maps has 844 reviews, 0 on Apple Maps. Another cafe, 202 reviews on Google, 1 on Apple Maps plus Apple hasn't updated the name. Also I quite like seeing the review text on Google, gives you a sense of what people like about a place and whether the review is genuine or just a grump. Apple seems to only show quite a simplified rating, although I've not used it enough to determine if there's more info in there.

Apple is probably better in the US where it has had a lot more use. It's pretty poor here for the main thing I use it for - finding businesses.

I want to use Apple Maps more, but in some parts of the world, the amount of info on Apple Maps (locations of places, restaurants, etc) is TINY compared to Google.

This is true, and it would be ideal if Apple Maps had more up-to-date business info.

But perhaps it’s okay for business directories to be separate tools from maps. Before the internet, you’d have Yellow Pages at home and a map in the car, right?

If we can’t accept that, then we might be stuck navigating with Google’s subpar app forever. I personally don’t mind looking up the business I’m interested in online before I navigate to it—in most cases I want to check their current hours on their own website or Facebook page anyway as even Google’s info can be out of date.

I find Apple Maps incredibly frustrating. The endless zooming-in and out when approaching turns. I want a consistent layout and structure when I glance down at a map. Not some gee-whiz-shiny display that only works well if you have been watching the entire animation.

It also seems to be deliberately obtuse when you want to zoom around the map. Like, how dare you not fully trust its routing.

I honestly love that zoom feature, because with Google Maps, I can't count how many times I've missed an exit due to thinking the blue line was just a little further up, and there's multiple exists clustered together.

I would switch to Apple Maps if there was a web-based version. I often search Google Maps in Firefox on Windows and then star map locations that I then pick up in the Google Maps app on my phone. I know the components of a web-based Apple Maps exist because sites like DuckDuckGo use them, but AFAICT there's no way to log into Apple Maps on the web.

"It's Apple Maps Bad"

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

Was there a need to make this comment thread iPhone ad? Is this some kind of submarine advertising thing?

What’s wrong with sharing my opinion when the subject is that google maps has become an eyesore (aka sucks visually)

The fact that your love of a phone has nothing to do with it. If I'd wanted to look at ads I'd open Google not HN.

Did you read the article? It is about the mobile experience....

One of the quotes was: "Google Maps still holds around 80% of the mobile market. But in recent years, I’ve found myself getting increasingly frustrated with the Google Maps experience, especially when it comes to general navigation and exploration of a map area."

And I wanted to say that overall, I barely feel any frustration as an iOS user. It is the truth for me, and my opinion. So I'm gonna say it.

Going to take a wild guess and say you didn't.

psst, kid: https://mapy.cz

Google has entered the rot phase of the big corp cycle.

so true.

on mobile the interface of waze is just cleaner.

It's interesting that Google has kept the Waze brand around. I expected them to merge it into maps when they bought it.

It's happening, it just took a while.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2023/06/waze-googles-other-ma...

I’m not sure you read that article. The separate Waze division has been rolled into the Geo (maps) team but the apps are not merging.

Yes, the apps have not been merged yet, but the article notes that Waze no longer exists as an independent entity internally and just had major layoffs, so it certainly sounds like the writing is on the wall.

It would be great if they replaced the Waze search with Google. I really like the waze mapping and interface, but when I use voice to search for a destination, it is nearly useless here in Sydney.

For example, if I search for an exact local place to eat, the top result is some completely irrelevant store on the other side of the city, followed by a list of useless distant results that I have to scroll through to, maybe, find the place I want to go to.

Whereas, the Google voice search finds it first go and starts navigating to it.

My biggest frustration with Google Maps is its insistence on always showing me Marx's grave. I live in North London, and whenever I plan a photography trip Google always shows me that genocidal maniac's grave. Oddly enough if I zoom in more it disappears. The Germans are much better at it. They just made a car park over Hitler's death location.

Marx? Genocidal? Are we even thinking of the same Marx here? Or is there a well known serial killer buried in North London that happens to be named Marx?

The funniest thing to me is that Google Maps seems to be the "normal person" option and yet only OSM tells me where water fountains are.

Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?

> Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?

It’s almost like this isn’t a thing folks are actually looking for.

I thought to try searching "public toilet" in Copenhagen, which I'm sure is something tourists search for.

It does show a few of them, but it also shows an apartment complex miscategorized as one, and misses several within the city centre. They are shown with various names ("Toilet", "Public toilet", "Public toilet for men", "Public restroom") so I think this is crowdsourced, rather than anything Google has made an effort to map.

Although the interface of https://www.openstreetmap.org/ doesn't have a way to highlight them, other interfaces (phone apps etc) can, and OSM has much better coverage.

Why is it that whenever somebody comes up with a clear cut and reasonable shortcoming of a big tech product, there's a mass of sycophants that crawl out of the ground to say "nobody wants that, you're just a weirdo"?

Everybody drinks water. It often isn't intuitively obvious where you can find water. Even in city parks, water fountains may not be where you expect but often are where you wouldn't. Google maps also sucks at finding bathrooms. Everybody pisses, even cyborgs.

> Why is it that whenever somebody comes up with a clear cut and reasonable shortcoming of a big tech product

Is it reasonable though?

Sticking to the cyborg larp? I shouldn't need to explain the relevance of water to you twice.

The point isn't the relevance of water, but the relevance of a specific feature to a given app.

Should Google Maps show me every single public bench too in case I need to sit down?

How about if I'm an avid cyclist, should they also show me every single secure railing I can lock my bike against?

Probably because 99% of normal people "don't refill their water bottles" (and surely not off of water fountains), just buy bottled water and/or drink when they stop at cafes and restaurants?

Not saying it's good. In fact, it's quite bad and harmful. But it just is.

This is very location dependant. In southern Europe there are places where most normal people actually would refill their water at the fountain when going through a town, and I have even faced small queues when the fountain is small but a slightly larger group is refilling bottles. In many small towns you don't even have a shop so buying bottles is not even an option. There's sometimes a local bar / restaurant but if you want to just get water that's a bit overkill.

It's because no one buys ads against water fountains.

Nah, it's just that 99% of people aren't so chronically online as to need a web service to find out how to freely drink water in a place with free water drinking infrastructure.

Well, maybe because I wasn't born there, but they're not always in the most obvious locations to me.

The extremely detailed mapping of drinking water on OSM that the OP alludes to, is more helpful than you assume. If you are cycling or hiking in baking-hot Southern Europe, or wandering through some picturesque villages, there are often springs hidden just off the trail that most people would never spot, if the map didn’t alert people to their presence. Also, with OSM one doesn’t need to be “chronically online” and use a “web service”, because various apps allow using OSM fully offline.

Agree with this. When I was cycling a lot, my summer workouts were planned around functional drinking fountains.

This is in the US even. Working drinking fountains are not as ubiquitous as you might think in a lot of areas.

I don't care where are water fountains, but what bus/train/metro can I take to go to another place, where is the bus stop. At what time does arrive, and which bus stop do I need to get down.

I can do that only on google maps. Open Street Map does not provide that info. Now I am sure there are some local app I can use for each individual city that works fine. But with google maps I only need to have one app.

As user, that is what is valuable for me. I honestly dont care about how clutter is the interface.

It's annoying, but if you are serious about taking public transit, you really do need to use the apps for whatever city you are in to get accurate information in my experience. Yes, Google Maps will tell you when a bus or metro is coming, but they often get it wrong, claiming that buses that run only on weekdays run on Saturday and so on.

Even if google maps is right, it isn't helpful to how people ride transit. Do you want to ride the 4 or 9 or 99? It doesn't matter, all of them go to where I'm going, but I have to choose when really I should just go to the stop and catch the first bus. This is a real situation for me where I selected the 4, but it turns out that it went by half a block before I reached the stop, and google maps got mad when I got on the 9 even though they both go exactly the same place (by a somewhat different route in between that didn't matter)

I haven't found city specific transit apps any more helpful, but I don't have much experience with them. google maps sucks is terrible for the job though.

Right. Last I tried, it's terribly difficult to get Google maps to show you directions for a bus route you just jumped on (and so it thinks you'll miss if you try to board).

there is a non-local app that does so for multiple cities:

https://transitapp.com/region#all-regions

I've used it in 2 larger US cities so far, and can vouch for its functionality

The Transportr app[0], which is Free Software and even on F-Droid, shows public transit directions for a number of cities around the world. There is now a standardized format for transit routing and timetables, and transit authorities freely share it, so for those cities Google has no especial monopoly in that regard.

[0] https://transportr.app/

For many, many major cities, the app you want is CityMapper, not Google Maps. Far superior for transit.

Google Maps often misses paths in parks that OSM has. I don't mean obscure trails deep in national forests, I mean paved paths in city parks. Google maps seems optimized for directing people to businesses that might advertise with Google, anything else languishes.

Worse, Google makes it really difficult for government GIS admins to upload the correct data. Last time I looked, if you ever want to update the bike/ped paths (like when a new one is constructed) they want you to upload ONLY the new part. This is really time consuming to extract only the new data, especially if you have multiple paths to update at the same time which are not connected. The sensible thing would be to just upload the entire path network for a city anytime there is an update, but apparently Google does not want you to do this.

Apple Maps is even worse, I don't think they even offer a way to update incorrect data -- not that I've been able to find. And it's super frustrating to use, because Apple Maps does not have a "Bicycle" layer that you can turn on and off to find pathways. They only appear if you plan a route. Totally idiotic.

Google maps is the poster child of missing common-sense features. Monopolies make bad products. Stop wondering.

Google lets bottle water stands pay money to get shown with a featured pin at a farther zoom level, why would they ever show free water fountains?

It's inflammatory, but this website is worse. There's some video playing of a stranger eating mustard skittles taking up the bottom quarter of the screen.

Wow, I tried disabling ublock and it is pretty bad. There are exactly 0 words of the body of the article visible when first loading the page on a 1440p monitor, two thirds of the screen are ads...

It's almost like you're teleported into browsing a different, parallel (and a way worse) web with a shitty UX when you turn off your ad-blocker.

Somehow AdGuard on mobile didn’t filter this horrible shit for me

Bromite didn't get it either. I think its a 1st party autoplay video?

Bromite is at this point abandonware, try Cromite instead

https://github.com/uazo/cromite

Awesome, thanks.

Weird. How does it integrate Adblock? Do they do a native Adblock the way brave does?

That’s funny I did not notice it when I read the article. Had to go back to check again; I think my mind just blurred it all out and let me focus on the tiny scrollable section where the story is.

Why would you not have ublock origin installed?

I do, but it doesn't stop this particular ad. It's an internal ad.

Well I don't see it, and I have ublock origin. That's the only thing that could be hiding it.

Or you're in a country where the ad isn't served.

I'm on mobile.

Firefox on mobile has ublock origin available too

Hmm, I use firefox with ublock just fine

iphone problems :(

Glad its just a work phone.

Vivaldi's ad blocker thankfully means I have no idea what you're referring to. Stay tuned though, by next year they'll have ads of your friends eating mustard skittles, whether they do or not.

Huh, I have uBlock on mobile and I still got the video - which is not an ad, it's just really shitty web design.

uBlock Origin is the correct one.

I'm on firefox with uBO and have no video playing.

Yes, I have uBlock origin on Kiwi browser.

Seems like people with uBlock are split between getting it and not, so maybe it's just not served to everyone?

A/B testing or regional variants maybe.

Firefox Android with uBO here, and I got it. It's not an ad, technically, it's labeled "Watch More From Fast Company".

I just had to check on my iPhone with Firefox and ProtonVPN (doing what it can at) filtering ads. and yes, I saw it, too. that's so fucked up. time to go back to some custom Android ROM with Firefox + uBlock.

Can you use reader mode on iPhone Firefox? I found that let me read the article without the ad.

Haha yea, i thought exactly the same thing! Business insider, fast company, wired, all in the same league…

You need to uncheck `Ignore generic cosmetic filters` in uBO.

Brave + PiHole + uBlock Origin = no video ad, no top banner ad

Firefox + PiHole + no extensions = dumbass video, blank top banner ad (all the space is taken up but no content)

Just to be fair, uBlock on Firefox removes it as well. Just to note, that Brave is adding nothing here.

I intended to imply that uBlock Origin was the difference.

The choice of browser just represents what I had available to test with where different results were shown.

Firefox + uBlock Origin = no ads

This isn't an ad, it's a really bad promotion for first-party content. I still see it with uBO on Firefox.

Maybe Brave has extra visual filters that block this specific div?

> promotion for first-party content

The pedant in me says: that's an ad.

It's just one of the rare ones not delivered by a gigantic network, so it's far less likely to be a scam or malware. Still an ad though.

Fair, but it's a category of ad that uBO has a very hard time with.

Yeah, this pissed me off too. I’m currently combing through iOS safari settings trying to find out how “allow videos to autoplay” was ever enabled (there is a setting for this in “accessibility” but doesn’t seem to fix this website at least so I’m still looking)

Sadly, autoplay-blocking seems to be even more of an arms race than ad blocking.

Apart from that, as long as this garbage takes up screen space, it's still not enough.

I hope that the person who invented the "sticky video" idea has a long and happy life, in a completely different job, completely separated from anything that has to do with marketing.

This is the dark pattern that I hate most on mobile by a 1000 miles.

Really, if people here wouldn't use ad blockers and desktop computers in the majority, noone would be discussing the article at all.

It's not realistic to discuss UX while plastering your website with things like "mustard skittles hahaha" unless you want to deceive people and dumb them down.

wow have they even looked at their own site? people need some self awareness

I’ve been using Apple Maps more and more lately and it’s quite refreshing. I prefer their rendering style now, just looks cleaner. Google Maps is really a mess.

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