Hacker News Reader

Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

That's how I feel using an iOS device - death by a thousand papercuts. All the apps are on the home screens, no dedicated back button...I can only use it for a few minutes before getting frustrated.

And apparently iOS doesn't have any public transit directions in the maps app? In 2012?! Are you fucking shitting me?

View on HN

Yep. If you go for public transit instructions, the Maps app will geolocate and prompt you to download a third party transit direction app that "might" be most appropriate.

It's going to go over like a lead balloon next week - I find Google's transit maps invaluable.

Given the relative popularity of mass transit inside and outside the US, I'm wondering if we're going to see greater divergence between iOS's US and non-US market share after iOS 6.

I'm also wondering if that's why this mistake was possible - too many suburban US decisionmakers who didn't understand in their gut why mass transit was a huge deal to a lot of people.

Google Maps doesn't have ANY public transit directions in most countries.

So you guys from the US need to stop acting as though this feature is somehow a game changer. It will almost exclusively affect US users only.

I'm an Australian living in Japan and this absolutely is a game changer for me. If anything I would think it affects many other countries more than the US.

I am not saying it is useful only that it is not a game changer for most people. Even in Japan you can use apps like Hyperdia for the JR and subways.

The iPhone predates the official launch of Google Transit and at the beginning didn't have many cities and so many providers have apps available.

> Even in Japan you can use apps like Hyperdia for the JR and subways.

That doesn't change the fact that Google Maps provides a complete, end-to-end solution for getting from point A to point B, using any combination of public transit options and walking.

For example, when I was in Japan, I was able to enter the addresses of the starting and ending points, and then get a list of travel options, with the total time and cost included for comparison. You can't get that if you're using a JR/subway-specific app.

Moreover, you can't just tap on an address in another app and have it take you directly to the Google Maps app anymore.

> The iPhone predates the official launch of Google Transit and at the beginning didn't have many cities and so many providers have apps available.

Yeah, and the original iPhone also didn't have any 3rd party apps. That doesn't mean it's acceptable in 2012 not to have 3rd party apps. It really doesn't matter what things were like before Google Transit launched. All that matters is the current situation, which is that Apple fucked up big time by allowing such a huge regression to get into a release version of iOS.

Google Transit is available for far more than just the US. http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/

Germany got support just a couple of days ago. That said, so far it only covers trains -- which also tells you that being marked green in that page doesn't say much about the extent of the support -- so for the most part I'm (happily) stuck with my existing dedicated public transport app.

UK here.. I use this feature multiple times a day. If it's not available, for me, it is a game changer. Moreover, Google transit was introduced in 2007, even before iPhone 3G, so I don't understand what do you mean by "The iPhone predates the official launch of Google Transit"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com