Apple to drop Google Maps in iOS 6 for in-house Maps?

But more importantly, Street View is not as useful as having good and up to date maps. GMaps added the maps for my town much later, but now the maps have good coverage and are up to date. No other service is as good as GMaps for Europe, although Yahoo Maps was better for Europe a while back.

Another thing is turn by turn navigation. Google does have turn by turn navigation for my country, which is freaking awesome. Not only that but for my town they announced they are working on adding info on public transport routes.

And btw, when I'm saying "my town", I mean Bucharest, Romania, Eastern Europe. And I don't know how people cope with the above in other countries, but in Bucharest the data for turn by turn navigation and for the public transport routes has to be refreshed very often, so I'm sure it's a PITA doing this for so many countries.

If nothing else, their database of businesses is hugely valuable and useful in its own app (it's what I use the Maps app for most and I don't think Apple will be able to fully replace it, at least not with the first iteration).

Sure there is the physical drive around stuff. But if you look at the C3 stuff (the company Apple bought that turns satellite images into 3D views) you can see where they might go with it. Also they do have a ton of cash and it would be seriously less than half a billion dollars to take a picture of the world. You might even get Toyota to make the 'steet view' edition version of the Prius in quantity.

The key thought for me here is that if this report is true, then Apple has decided mapping is strategic and taken it in house. And like Google (who did this in part so they could offer turn by turn directions [1]) they could exploit data they own for a wide variety of purposes.

[1] The original sources of Google's map information did not include a license to use it for turn by turn as that was exclusively given to another company by the vendor. Google had to acquire their own data without those restrictions in order to do navigation.

When my GPS broke down, I didn't start using my phone, I just bought another GPS for 99 euro.

(And funny thing is the old one has just some loose wires and could be fixed a few months later by an electrician.)

I'm sure Apple could improve those things and I may well notice and appreciate the improvements. But I'd much rather see turn by turn navigation and useful traffic data. [1]

[1] By useful, I just mean something proactive and actionable. Allowing me to manually scan my route to look for yellow and red highlights doesn't really help. And by the time I know I'm in a jam, it's not a huge help to know how far the jam is. It's nice, but I'm already in the jam.

It would be awesome if we could get something that takes a programmed commute and sends notifications about backups not yet encountered and offers alternate routes -- taking into account the full traffic situation. So that if the 'obvious' detour is already also backed up, it doesn't send me that way either.

Imagine my surprise when not only did it not have turn by turn navigation, but it didn't recalculate the route when we made a wrong turn and were clearly driving off of the calculated path. I couldn't believe that such a feature was missing on the iPhone version of Google Maps.

Is there some reason that this is the case? I don't know enough about mapping and phones to know if this is due to some technical limitation or not.

It's common knowledge that Apple has been buying maps companies to build their own app, but AFAIK this is the first time we've gotten a solid release date.

Hn is run on a software stack that allows a registered user to submit a link/URL to an item they determine to be of potential interest to the community.

After that link is submitted it appears on the listing of recently submitted articles at the /newest URL. Other users (with sufficient karma) that also find the link of value either upvote it, flag it, and/or comment on it.

As an item receives upvotes and/or comments an algorithm ranks it accordingly amongst other submitted stories, making it potentially visible on the "front page" of the site.

An items ranking is an overall generic indication that a sufficient number of users have found it noteworthy (or not).

It's all really pretty basic and uses a concept that has been around for about 7 or 8 years now. However this "how did this item get to the front page..." question seems to come up with enough frequency that an answer should be more easy to find, or maybe even be emailed to all new accounts so that people will not need to ask these sorts of questions amongst discussions of the article itself.

I understand the Google version uses vectors rather than images, so it should work better, but never did for me.

It's not as if Apple doesn't permit them, they just choose not to include it for free.

Would you say Google is obligated to add free text messages to Android just because Apple has it (iMessage) and it saves money for people?

In fact, that might even be better for Google. They've griped in the past about how Apple was slow to implement new features.

In particular, I know they hated the YouTube app (which Apple made). That's why the mobile site no longer redirects to the app - they wanted to be able to control the experience and iterate faster.

(I suspect the only reason Google hasn't terminated their agreement on the preinstalled apps already is because having YouTube and Google Maps on every single iOS device is worth more than fast integration of new features.)

It is impressive but not really hard (theoretically).

Check out eg http://maps3d.svc.nokia.com/webgl/index.html

That said, Google's been doing this for years and this is kind of the thing that they would be very good at (making sense out of a large corpus of data quickly). I'd be very surprised if Apple's new maps were as good out the door (let alone better).