Apple partner says new Maps app in iOS 6 is terrible | Hacker News Reader

Apple partner says new Maps app in iOS 6 is terrible

bgr.com

34 pointsuladzislau53 comments

A competitor of TomTom indicates that Apple is relying mostly on TomTom for mapping data, and says "they've chosen the weakest partner" and "their data is terrible." Not exactly a neutral source.

Not that it's necessarily untrue; they might be gambling like they did with Siri, that the best way to get a service like this running well is to ship it and respond to real-world feedback.

As anyone who has tried the iOS6 betas can confirm, the maps are pretty bad. I've looked for directions to nearby towns and it will send me to another country. Searching for directions from my office to a friends house sent me to a point that didn't even have the town's name anywhere near it.

And as far as I know, you can't search for public transport directions (at least in London a month ago), which was practically 60% of my maps usage. I had to either use google maps mobile web app or downgrade to iOS5. I did the latter.

Apple are allowing apps, in iOS6, to declare that they can provide routing info so I don't thin it'll be too long before these gaps close themselves.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/13/apple_hands_off_tr...

This might work well in android where if one app (maps) hands over control to another (third party public transit info) -- the global back button will take you back to the first application when needed.

iOS always seemed to be designed with monolithic apps that did everything and hence not require too much app switching to complete a certain task. (at least on the iPhone. On the iPad the four finger swipe makes this a moot point)

But what iOS needs is for google to provide a replacement maps app and to register itself as the default maps handler (in effect stop the built in and useless-at-this-point-to-me maps application from ever launching)

I guess I'll hold off judgement until I actually use it.

From the release notes: "Apps that offer routing information, such as turn-by-turn navigation services, can now register as a routing app and make those services available to the entire system"

Makes me hope a 3rd party transit app will be able to provide routing information in a format the default maps app will be able to display.

I would love Maps to be able to mash together the data from 2 or more routing apps in order to give me a complete journey!

Ah interesting. I wonder if they had to part ways with Google a little before they were ready to?

I don't understand this as mapping is an endlessly moving target. There is never going to be a perfect time to release it. The best Apple can do is make sure it is okay and then update it as frequently as possible.

That's exactly what Google have done.

"As anyone who has tried the iOS6 betas can confirm"... by violating their NDA and confirming issues with _beta_ software?

I'm guessing, myself, that the Apple Maps are going to be crappy compared to google for at least a year, or two. And it's probably going to be half a decade before we see even rough parity on their routing (particularly walking/transit).

But lets be critical about their released product and respect the Beta envelope until it's opened.

The final GM version has been out for over a week now, you don't sign an NDA if you download it from third party sources. The maps still sucks in the GM version.

Not to be a stickler, but the map data comes from the server, not from the Maps app itself. Thus, even though you have the GM Maps app, you do not necessarily know whether the user experience will still suck on the final release day, tomorrow. They could push out some final massive improvement to the server data before then. :) (No, I have no special knowledge of this, and if I did I wouldn't say.)

Full disclosure: I am biased. I worked on Apple's maps team, last year, so naturally I want the app to be good.

Well, the reviewers have had access to the same data as I have and critized the map data quality - I doubt Apple would delay an update of their map data they have ready to launch just for the heck of it at the cost of a lot of negative commentary.

The app itself is great, unfortunately the data quality isn't anywhere close to even the quality the iOS 5 Google Maps data. Apart from the obvious flaws like no street view or transit data, the pure data is not good too unfortunately. Let's hope Apple improves it fast, but I'm not too hopeful considering that Google has spent the last 7 years gathering data and improving their maps (and getting a lot of exclusive info submitted by their users).

No, you just admit publicly to violating Apple's copyright in order to disparage them. Good play.

+1 to the person who publicly violates Apple's copyright to give us information.

-1 to the person who complains about it.

No, I'd rather we didn't all voluntarily self censor to benefit Apple's paranoid secretive marketing.

I'm sorry you feel this way about it, but the Golden Master has been out for a while and I'm not sure how this violates the NDA (I haven't said anything that you wouldn't have learnt from any website already from… "people who have tried the betas"), so it's not an issue with beta software. In fact, I was replying to the comment in order to confirm that yes, tomtom is probably the weakest partner, and the article is not showing simply a biased opinion.

Google Maps ALWAYS send me to other countries so I am used to it.

And in the two main Australian cities is not far off Google Maps. Definitely not bad or unusable in any way.

Off on a slight tangent here, but http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/tom-tom-g... is interesting. Made me replace my GPS.

From the article you linked:

  > The Dutch police use the information obtained "to put up 
  > speed cameras and speed traps.

I'm amused, as the Tomtom I just recently purchased purports to show the location of red light and speed cameras. It works both ways.

>A competitor of TomTom..

Was it Navteq/Nokia or Google? Because those are TomTom's only major competitors.

God forbid you click the article link and read 3 sentences.

But then you wouldn't have time to make snarky comments, right?

I've been using Maps for many months as part of the developer program.

They are not "terrible" but they are significantly worse than Google Maps. Let me count the ways:

1) "International" support is actually terrible. Whereas Google Maps has just about every road in Bastia (Corsica, France) accurately labeled, Apple Maps had almost none.

2) Search is not as reliable and sometimes comes up with obscure unrelated responses.

3) Several times I've been lead to the wrong spot in remote areas, either because of inaccurate addressing or slightly off road maps.

4) Public transit is not built in. I've pretty much stopped taking the bus. Hopefully third party providers will fill this gap.

This is a great article on why Apple will have a hard time competing with Google Maps:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go....

Unfortunately, Google Maps on iPhone Safari is barely usable.

On the plus side, Siri integration with spoken turn-by-turn directions is a huge improvement, and the lock screen has a nice heads-up nav display. Yelp integration is also a nice touch.

I've been using the new Maps for a few months since it appeared in the first beta builds. I live in Sydney, Australia and the search struggles to find places. It's not so bad if you put in the entire address, but a search for a store or location regularly returns nothing.

I've noticed that this has been improving lately. When it first came out a search for "Apple Store Chatswood" (2km from my work) would return stores in the USA. Now it returns the correct destination.

It's still not a trustworthy source of directions and I regularly have to use Google Maps via the browser.

So while this is very frustrating, I can see it improving so am not too worried long term.

Mind you if Google Maps was an App in the Store I'd buy it asap.

Yeah, I've been using iOS 6 and the new Maps is fine. It's not perfect, I guess, but there were issues with the old, Google-based app as well. The thing about Apple is they iterate quickly on things like this, so I expect that the kinks with their map app (backend, dataset-related issues included) will be ironed out soon.

> The thing about Apple is they iterate quickly on things like this

do they? I don't doubt their ability to solve hard problems elegantly (if a problem happens to be one they want to solve), but I can't think of any strong parallels to this that would suggest that. Their other services seem to iterate on much the same time scales as their major app and OS releases (especially in the last 5 years).

I prefer the Yelp integration, which gives me reasonably reliable ratings, reviews, and hours, to Google's albeit larger dataset. The 3D buildings also pack a strong "wow" punch, though more how flying around satellite view on the first iPad did than in any practical sense.

That said, the map "feel" is still clunky - I don't need 30th St, 31st St, 32nd St, 33rd St, etc. individually labelled and its iconography gets visually crowded.

I'll be the one outlier and confess that, interestingly enough, particularly as someone who doesn't drive, that I've never used Google Maps for transit routing. I've visited Chicago, London, San Francisco - and extensively used mass transit in all these places - but it never occurred to me that I could use Google for routing instructions - I've always used the local Cal Train/Bart/Tube/El Apps that give me routing information and departure/arrival times.

In hindsight, I feel a little foolish now that I've discovered that I could have done this with Google Maps (Ironic, given that I _do_ use Google Maps for cycling/walking directions)

I guess that puts me as one of the few Mass Transit riders that won't be negatively impacted by the upgrade (downgrade?) to the iPhone 5.

In San Francisco the iOS 5 maps app doesn't have real-time schedule information on the buses, so it's not that useful except for the route itself.

The loss of transit directions is just critical. One of the most important features of my iPhone that I rely on every single day and they're ripping it out. I won't be upgrading to iOS 6 until they fix this.

I wouldn't mind so much if I at least know what trains were at a certain station in NYC.

Its completely unhelpful.

I've been disappointed with maps, but would be incredbily surprised if Google doesn't release a stand-alone iOS version of their maps app within days or weeks. Whether it will include turn-by-turn directions is an unanswered question in my mind, but it would at least solve public-transportation and street-view needs. I suppose you'd still be stuck using Apple's maps for any in-app mapping development unless you can work out a deal with another provider or roll your own OSM implementation.

You think? I don't see that much upside for google (do they really make that much money from ads inside maps?)... at the same time mapping is such a critical application I can see it having a dramatic effect in the iOS vs android wars.

I would guess that all of that data from iOS users would be worth the price of collection (releasing an app).

Think of it this way. The more Google knows about its users, the better-positioned they are to make more money off of them. If they know a person travels to a certain part of the city/state/country/world they can use that information to serve more context-appropriate ads to that person elsewhere in the Google eco-system. There's tremendous value in location - I don't see them giving that up.

I would be very surprised if the Google (search) website could share information like location with a hypothetical Google Maps app. And even if it could, I would expect Apple to shut down that avenue eventually.

Every Google iOS app has encouraged users to login to their Google account. I'd surprise me if this isn't the case with the maps app as well, and there's a convincing reason to encourage people to do so - giving them the ability to send directions to your phone from desktops and other devices. While it doesn't mean everyone will do this, they could still use anonymous location information to direct users to businesses in whatever context the user is most-applicable to the user (i.e. if they're shopping in a mall, or something like that).

Maps now Google tracker ap

Perhaps Google should charge $5 or $10 or even more for turn by turn. Good turn by turn GPS + traffic updates is a killer app for many phone users.

I've been using the beta to navigate around Vancouver for a month or so and it works quite well. Turn by turn with voice commands through bluetooth to my car is great. The Yelp integration is pretty useful too. Big thing that's missing is the street view, but not something I've used much in the past.

Regardless of how it stands compared to standalone GPS units and Android it's a big improvement over the previous maps app.

> Big thing that's missing is the street view, but not something I've used much in the past.

I suspect that puts you in a tiny minority...

Streetview is a huge deal.

The lack of transit integration also pretty much makes Apple's maps a non-starter for me.

I'm curious to see what they do in places like Tokyo, where public transit is used for a huge majority of trips, and the transit system is complicated enough that a good routing app is very useful. The iphone is very popular in Japan, so I'd think Apple would be somewhat reluctant to just give its customers the finger like that...

> The iphone is very popular in Japan, so I'd think Apple would be somewhat reluctant to just give its customers the finger like that...

This is a potential goldmine for Android OEMs. The Japanese frequently buy new phones (more so than any other country, I believe), and if word gets out that the iPhone doesn't have public transit directions, they could easily make a lot of sales.

Then again I've heard that the Japanese have this magical invention called an "app" which someone can install on their phone to add new functionality.

I've even heard that there are some ones already for say the Tokyo subway.

There are lots of third-party transit routing possibilities (although many are not so great). Nonetheless, many people will use the defaults, and having to switch apps to do something which didn't use to require it is, of course, annoying. Basically, the phone sucking by default is not a particularly good business strategy.

My suspicion is that the Japanese resellers (au, SoftBank) will preinstall something better than Apple's map (maybe Google's rumored new mapping app). I've no idea how much freedom they have to do this under their contracts with Apple, though, or whether they could integrate such an app more deeply (e.g. cause it to be used as the system default mapping app).

Actually Google's transit directions are horrible in Japan, so the Japanese will probably be the least affected by this.

> Actually Google's transit directions are horrible in Japan

This is absolutely not true.

Or rather, it wasn't true until about a week or two ago, when something suddenly seemed to go dreadfully wrong. My presumption is that this was a bug in a new release; we'll see.

No I suspect you are the minority. Streetview is nice but hardly critical.

And transit integration is important ONLY for those in the US but poorly implemented/not existent in the rest of the world. Most public transport providers I've seen have had their own dedicated apps for transit for years now.

> And transit integration is important ONLY for those in the US but poorly implemented/not existent in the rest of the world

You are wrong. Hint: I don't live in the U.S.

> Most public transport providers I've seen have had their own dedicated apps for transit for years now.

... and most suck. Even those that don't suck explicitly, suck simply by requiring the user to switch apps for something that is very naturally integrated with mapping.

And of course in the case of cities like Tokyo, where there are dozens of different rail operators, and a single trip often involves more than one, provider-specific apps are a decidedly poor solution.

The inability to easily use the public transportation option was the biggest issue for me.

You can get walking directions in iOS 6

http://lifehacker.com/5943259/get-walking-directions-in-ios-...

And by "partner" BGR of course actually meant "competitor".

And by author, BGR meant Android Columnist:

Dan joins the BGR team as the Android Editor, covering all things relating to Google’s premiere operating system

Said Dan Graziano...

"Dan joins the BGR team as the Android Editor, covering all things relating to Google’s premiere operating system. ..."

iOS 6 maps is a massive step backwards in an otherwise solid release. I'm looking forward to Google releasing their own maps app, assuming they do. For now, I'll get by with their web app.

Sorry, you guys are just not thinking differently enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com