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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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