The problem is, i keep using maps because google has the best POI system/database around, and it will take other apps long yo beat it, even apples POIs cant hold up…
But yeah, add a third "hell yes" to hating not being able to see street names. I wonder if some of it is cultural differences - the maps apps seem really insistent that I can always see things like highway numbers and route numbers, which we have, but apart from major motorways (e.g. "M2") we don't really use any of those at all and refer to streets by their actual name. I wonder if it's more common to refer to numbered routes more in the US, and the apps are geared that way because of it?
* Open the app. Instead of getting a map you get, "What's happening nearby" or somesuch. And how to close this changes with every release. I have NEVER in life life EVEN ONCE opened a mapping program because I was simply bored and wanted some other place to go.
* Search for "$name_of_place_or_business in $specific_city". Instead, it gives you all the locations with a similar name near your current location until you massage the query in some way. (It doesn't do this all the time but more than enough to be annoying.)
* Search for the name of a road or intersection in a city. It will instead give you a list of businesses with similar names, or in some cases, having nothing to do with the name you searched for.
* Search for the name of a particular business. Get results for their competitors instead. (Feels illegal.)
* The traffic overlay changed months back so that only interstate traffic is visible at normal zoom levels. Now you have to zoom in WAY too far for the feature to be actually useful on all other roads. Someone is asleep at the wheel at Google. (Pun intended.)
The Google Assistant is also the most useless piece of crap ever. "OK Google show me all the businesses on the map" doesn't work, and neither does "OK Google zoom in" for that matter. Most useless UX ever.
We were trying to find somewhere to eat... And a labeled map of the city blocks around us would have been perfect. We didn't really care what kind of food we had, we aren't picky folks... We just wanted to know the options to see what sounded good at the time.
But nope, can't see that either.
When Google Maps is a one-size-fits-all product, you can't blame them for choosing an approach like this. Fortunately, the OSM ecosystem lets you choose (or develop for yourself) whatever approach you prefer.
To correct this you need something like QZSS or accurate models of the buildings to compensate for it.
Even short buildings have issues here - if you walk down a wide street in Tokyo, which are pretty common and often surrounded by 3-4 story buildings, with the map open and look at it closely, you will often show up on the other side of the street. (Which surprised me, because it's literally why QZSS exists.)
Afaik, the issues with WiFi are that if you're traveling at any speed there isn't much time to do scans, and the position of the WiFi networks themselves isn't clear enough because of multipath (reflections), because it is crowdsourced from other devices that don't have real ground truth locations, and because the other devices gathering info are at different heights above ground or are indoors.
The main advantage of A-GPS with WiFi is that it starts up faster and that it mostly works indoors or when you can't see any satellites.
You might be thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS.
I also dont think that this is the reason that the street names are often hidden.
I don't know about every street. But if you zoom in all of the way then yes, every street more than slightly in the viewport should be labeled. I have the same problems with all sorts of things like lakes where you need to find the magic zoom level and map position that reveals the name.
Some things are understandably harder, I don't necessarily need the Country, Province and City in every view of the map. But streets and lakes tend to not have much stuff inside of them so it seems obvious that when zoomed far in they should appear.
I don't recall offhand whether it's Apple or Google maps that do this. Maybe both.
But why? Google Maps is not a navigation aid. Its purpose is not to help you know the name of the street you are in. It's a tool for paying customers to steer you towards their shops. If all you need to do is follow a path towards a certain shop, they don't need to show you the names of the streets.
They monetize the map other ways, like with the expensive API fees, but I wonder if they really care about it. Whenever I look at it for a few seconds I see something obviously sloppy, like misspelled POI names or people adding fake businesses at their apartment.
People don't open the app to look at the ads. They open it to navigate, and if it can't be used for that purpose they won't open it at all. It is infuriating to me when a Wendy's ad is given more visual importance in color and size on the app than the actual place I want to find. But it doesn't seem to bother a lot of other people. Somewhere further in the direction of more advertisements is a point where a significant number of normal people will stop using Maps as a navigation tool, and somewhere further still is a point where more advertisements will become less profitable and will be rejected by even the developers. But we're nowhere near that point yet.
Until then, I'll keep using a combination of Garmin Explore, OsmAnd, and Maps depending on how much I care about topo data, traffic status, reviews, search results, and ads. I'm setting up an Owntracks so I can replace the Timeline data that they're removing customer access to, and contributing to OpenStreetMap, but still using Maps.