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Comment by muraiki | Hacker News Reader

I remember when my wife got her iPhone 4S. We were heading out to somewhere and, having an Android phone for work and seeing that her iPhone had a Google Maps application, figured that we could use her phone to help us get to our destination.

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.

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> Is there some reason that this is the case?

The app is made by Apple, not Google, though it is using Google's API. So it isn't really "Google" Maps.

It used to be you could only get those features by purchasing Apples $50/year add on which included turn by turn and device locator functionality (parents could track children or you could catch a thief after your phone was stolen). Not sure if those are still options or not.

Can you detail that ? I don't know that Apple ever offered a monthly turn by turn option, only carriers. The device locator was/is free.

For turn by turn a lot os ios users use the Waze app. I've used it a fair bit and really like it.

I’m sure Apple would if the could. They obviously can’t, though. I can’t imagine that Google would allow them to implement those features. So Google is the holdup. Apple uses Google’s API and is completely dependent on them in what they can do. (Hey, that’s their right. No problem with that. You don’t have to allow your competitor everything.)

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 has made it very clear that they want to build Google Maps for iOS and provide the same experience as is available on Android. It was, for a long time, an explicit no-no to provide turn-by-turn navigation in an iOS app.

There's no excuse now, though. A top ten app on the store is MotionX Drive, there are even apps by Navigon and TomTom out there too. Google could come along and eat all of their collective lunches if they'd just do it.

No, they still can't because it reproduces functionality of the OS. They could provide just navigation, but if they ported the Google Maps app to iOS, it's very likely that it will be rejected for the same reason that a port of Chrome would.

Uhm, it’s Google that doesn’t allow turn-by-turn navigation, not Apple. I bet Apple would be delighted if they could.

Port of Chrome would be rejected for completely different reason: Apple disallows downloading and executing dynamic code from internet unless they're executed by Safari's JavaScript engine. This is not the case with Map. There's already a lot of GPS apps with different map data than the one in Maps app.

Not true, as the other apps already have a very, very similar mapping function (MotionX especially, if you don't spring for the turn-by-turn option)

Can Apple do it in their own app? That’s the relevant question. Third party apps are irrelevant.

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.)

That lackluster Google experience is exactly why Apple is building a replacement in-house. They are sick of dealing with Google undercutting them.

Apple made the app.

...abiding by the limitations imposed by the Google Maps API which is what is to blame for it lacking those features.

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