"but it is described as a much cleaner, faster, and more reliable experience"
I'm sorry, but what a lot of bullshit.
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.
In case you aren't aware, the Android version doesn't download the image tiles, rather it downloads the raw data and renders the streets and everything client side. This makes it much faster to get the data and makes a smoother zoom experience.
The turn by turn, though, would be much more welcome. Though now that I think about it, turn by turn would increase my use dramatically and probably expose more poor network situations where the client-side rendering would make a difference.
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.
The app is made by Apple, not Google, though it is using Google's API. So it isn't really "Google" Maps.
That is exactly the reason why Apple has to do it on their own. It might be worse than Google Maps (at least in the beginning or forever), but at least it will allow for progress.
Google doesn’t allow third party developers (and that includes Apple, obviously) to offer turn-by-turn navigation. Here are the terms (10.2 c): https://developers.google.com/maps/terms
Letting Google build the maps app is obviously out of the question. That’s a pretty ridiculous idea. Would Google let Apple build a critical piece of Android? Obviously not.
(Also, where has Google made that clear? That’s a serious question. I’m not aware of any such statements from Google, so it would be awesome if you could point me in their direction.)
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.)
But normal people doesn't.
Which is that iOS users have been denied the luxury of excellent and free turn-by-turn navigation available on Android, and this maps update does nothing to address that.
Of course, they'd undercut all the paid turn-by-turn apps, but they haven't been shy about that sort of thing in the past.
The 99 euro GPS I was talking about was the cheapest in store and it even had Traffic Message Channel (TMC), something the older one didn't.
Also, the GPS would get super hot in the windshield -- I would have never used my phone instead!
Anyhow, all that out of the way, I guess you are right that turn by turn would be nice on iOS.
But since a mobile app depends on a mobile data plan I could never use it when I need the GPS the most: when I'm abroad.
Within the US I guess it would make sense to start using you phone and your data plan as a GPS, but within EU it would get really expensive really fast. That's why a dedicated GPS unit seemed to me like a better idea.
No.
Microsoft was blasted because you had no choice in the matter, even if you wanted to use a different browser than IE, there was no way to make anything but IE behave well with the rest of the OS.
Every other GPS system, including the expensive Navigon package I bought for my iPhone ask you State? City? Street? Number? Oh how I'd love for someone to be able to text me their address while I'm driving and be able to click the link and be automatically routed.
Google's upper hand is in integration. If I had a Tom Tom or a Garmin that could read my email or texts and then start navigating, I'd buy it.
Editing something is usually fast, having it percolate to all users of the data is much longer (for GMaps, but I expect it's similar for OSM).