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Comment by botanical | Hacker News Reader

I just tried it on Firefox with https://beta.maps.apple.com/abc, and all the POIs are incorrectly placed (at least in South Africa) and the roads are right-angled and un-named.

Also, Apple makes an absolute mess when contributing to the OpenStreetMap project. For example, their contributors make any informal / illegal shortcut part of a residential street when it isn't.

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Firefox is not currently a supported browser.

Links like https://beta.maps.apple.com/abc still work.

Neither firefox nor chrome works on android with that link.

According to the linked support page, nothing except Apple OSes and Windows is supported; not even desktop Linux! That's quite an accomplishment in 2024. They really went above and beyond in not supporting any modern browser.

Interestingly that /abc link works for me on Linux (Brave), but the published link doesn't work for me on Linux+any browser, Chrome included.

Agreed, quite annoying. I own a bunch of Apple stuff, but when they do this crap i can't invest further into their ecosystem because it's unusable to me much of the time.

"Support for additional languages, browsers, and platforms will be expanded over time."

Sounds like it is a true beta and not a "Google" beta.

Works for me on FF dev edition. I bet WebGPU support is required (mainline FF does not support this).

Works for me on FF 127 with Chameleon posing as Chrome 126, so I think this is not the case.

Use an extension to change your useragent string; it mostly works on firefox, just expect bugs.

> Also, Apple makes an absolute mess when contributing to the OpenStreetMap project. For example, their contributors make any informal / illegal shortcut part of a residential street when it isn't.

This would be very bad, where are you getting this from? That their own maps implementation doesn't work outside of Chrome/Safari doesn't sound nearly as bad as if they're damaging an entire ecosystem like that.

I contribute to OSM, and I've seen it in my own local town. It's not so much nefarious as it is negligent. They don't have local knowledge, see a satellite image of what seems like a road and decide it connects to existing residential roads. If you spend time on it, you'll notice it too as it was common enough for me to notice it.

https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues is where you can give feedback to Apple‘s OSM mapping team. There’s one thread per country

You have any concrete examples of this happening you could link to?

I found this after scrolling through the linked GitHub issues where they overwrite local surveyed data with an interpretation based on satellite imagery: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/109846534

Probably not without self-doxxing.

Do you have reference to this being based on an Apple change and based on analysis of satellite images?

Firefox on Ubuntu works on my machine, but only using your link, and it displays "[App.AppleMaps.Title]" as the tabs title. The POIs seem to be correct in Switzerland.

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