Building a good maps service is miles outside of Apple’s core competency, so this is all very sad – but at the same time no surprise at all.
(Mind you, all this at best explains the bad maps experience, it does not excuse it.)
Google and Apple have been unfriending each other since Schmidt resigned from Apple's board three years ago. A jilted Apple is again "looking and feeling" for reasons to drag the ex who cheated on them into court. Heck, in Samsung, they are even treating one of their current "friends with benefits" like an ex.
TomTom's response, "We are a paid escort service, you can find us in the phonebook."
But Apple didn't want a relationship, just a one time cash transaction so that Apple can encroach on TomTom's business. Part of me suspects that Apple got the worst possible data set TomTom could deliver and still plausibly argue they met the requirements of their agreement with Apple. There was no strategic advantage in doing otherwise.
Apple needs to move on. It was Google that did the cutting off.
I disagree. Even if they gave them a high quality data set, that set is going to be obsolete within a year (let's say). Now Apple can either choose to keep obsolete data (which will definitely impact customers) or buy updated data from TomTom.
TomTom's problem is that their devices only communicate one direction. A partnership with Apple could have allowed TomTom to collect realtime data directly in the same way as their major competitors.
In the next twelve months, Apple will probably have collected more useful data than TomTom in many respects. That doesn't mean they will be successful in using it to their advantage, but it does mean that there is little reason for Apple to purchase a new dataset.
Maybe my creativity is limited but I just don't see how Apple being able to collect data would help with getting updated maps. I think it could help with their directions since they know the most commonly taken routes and could actually even time people's routes to find which are truly the quickest, but I don't know how it would help with updating maps from road changes and the like.
I have fallen victim to this. I bought a new used car (it's new to me but a 2007 model) that has built in navigation. Between the date of manufacture of the nav disk and current date, an interstate was added/modified near me. Now everytime I go by that area my GPS says I'm in the middle of a field. In reality, I can't see a customer filing a ticket with Apple to get that road in the GPS system. Even if they do, Apple would most likely need coordinates. This construction of new roads is what TomTom has a temporary strategic advantage over Apple (only temporary since Apple could get a department together to monitor all new roads).
The other thing you ignore is that people want their local data to be correct in the maps they use, for practical reasons. I too reported new construction around my home everywhere I could, because it's, among other things, in my best interest to have my address easy to find (by guests or postal drivers, for example) on any GPS out there.
And yes, there is a privacy policy. See http://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/safeguarding-your-data/
Nokia has hardware and maps; Microsoft brings in its OS. That either is win-win, or lose-lose, but there is little reason for either party to be suspicious of the other at the moment.
On the other hand, Apple has good reasons to be suspicious of Google. Collaboration with google can be a win-loose combination, with Apple at the losing end: Google wins if iPhone fails.
The relationship with Google came apart when Apple would not allow Google Voice on the iPhone.
http://betanews.com/2009/08/03/eric-schmidt-leaves-apple-s-b...
Also, Apple-Twitter and Apple-Facebook are, I think, good complementary fits, too, and that only because their own attempts at social networking have been 'less successful'. I do not see that changing anytime, if only because one cannot expect that all one's friends use Apple hardware, and I do not see Apple develop e.g. FaceTime and Messages for Windows.
I do wonder why Apple chose to build its own mapping solution. I think the only logical follow-up to that would be that they went their own way for search, too.
I am not sure they could have done things much quicker to be honest.
That's more or less what they did, the maps are coming from TomTom and Waze. The main issue with the iOS 6 maps application appears not to be with the map data itself, but with the (lack of) points-of-interest and their accuracy, which cripples the search functions. A company like TomTom is mainly concerned with maps and points-of-interest for car navigation, much less with finding individual shops, landmarks or other places you find by other means than street address. Probably you won't have any problems finding gas stations, motels or roadside restaurants and such with iOS 6 maps, but good luck finding all widget shops in New York. TomTom's navigation units do have some points-of-interest outside of what you'd expect from a satnav, but it's a far, far cry from the amount of data Google has.
As it stands, I don't think there is any single party besides Google that has so much diverse geographically indexed data. There simply is no company that Apple could have bought to fill that gap. It will probably take them years to gather even half of the data Google Maps already provides.
If you compare the first example image from the article [2] with the TomTom data [3] you can see the minor roads are present in TomTom's data, present in Google's data, but absent in the screenshot of Apple's software.
This may well indicate a problem with Apple's software.
[1] http://routes.tomtom.com [2] http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/63010000/jpg/_63010615... [3] http://routes.tomtom.com/map/Sunderland%2520Street%252C%2520...
Vector slippy maps run on bounding box searches - if I look at New York, my client says to the server "Tell me all the roads within this square" with the latitude and longitude of wherever I'm looking.
There's a lot of data - too much to store on one server - and the data doesn't all shard naturally. You can divide the world up into squares and store different squares on different servers, but long roads cross many squares, big objects like country borders belong in many squares, and when you're zoomed out your view covers many squares.
The server also has to be clever; I don't actually want every road in New York or the data would take forever to load. I only want the major roads when I'm zoomed out.
All these problems are solvable - spatial databases like PostGIS have been able to perform bounding box queries for years - but I don't know of anyone using PostGIS to support the millions of users Google have. It's well known that for regular data Google has things like BigTable, fancy NoSQL stuff that's supposed to scale well; I assume they have a geospatial database along similar lines. It's possible Apple decided to develop something similar.
My guess as to how [1] came about is that the user started zoomed out, so they only got sent major roads, then when they zoomed in some hiccup prevented loading the minor roads. This could have been as simple as the user's wifi going down, or it could that Apple's database servers are overloaded or have bugs.
[1] http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/63010000/jpg/_63010615...
No wonder it's so terrible. I have Waze but I see it as nothing more than a navigation toy. It has turn by turn but otherwise it's pretty terrible compared to google maps.
I'm downgrading back to 5.1.1.
That may sound flip, but I'm very serious. Their app commits the cardinal sin of going out of its way to distract people who are driving a ton of metal and plastic at high speeds (what the hell is a mapping application doing with "pick-ups" on the road and why the hell is it beeping at me for it?!). It's the most irresponsible app I've seen on a phone. I don't call many companies "evil" but Waze seems maliciously so.
As far as Google giving them turn-by-turn capabilities-- that's really the special sauce that sets Android apart. It was probably available, but at a price that Apple didn't want to pay. Plus, Apple probably didn't like that they weren't getting their 30% on the revenue from local search in the Google Maps app.
So, in the long run this will work out for Apple. Sure, the users will be affected in the short term and it may never actually be as good as Google Maps.... but hey look, shiny pictures of 3D buildings
Before Google Maps, digital maps were HORRIBLE. Even the first iterations of Google Maps were better than just about everything, save for a Thomas Guide. Everyone has gotten used to putting data into a map application and being returned a reasonalbly correct set of instructions or representation of data.
This is inexcusable today. As far as horrible changes you can make to a smartphone, this ranks way up there (short of having a dialer that doesn't work).
Ultimately I imagine that Apple will get Maps solid eventually, but not delivering a solid product initially will cost them.
Incidentally they did buy a couple of companies related to mapping, so they've got some in-house knowledge of mapping but a poor dataset will always be poor no matter how many smart people are sat looking at it.
One statement contradicts my statement, and the other supports it.
The Maps application probably does have some flaws, but it seems a lot of the flaws are coming from it's mapping data that's stored. This is why buying TomTom wouldn't improve the situation, as the data set itself is where the issue is. In response to ZeroGravitas' statement that TomTom would have noticed before it does depend entirely on how the data set from TomTom is being used but that doesn't necessarily mean that the application is flawed, it could indicate that the data points they've been supplied with aren't consistent for what the application is trying to do.
Apple has made a mistake though, ZeroGravitas is bang on about the buck stopping there. In the UK however we're seeing all sorts of mapping data glitches causing the issues, rather than anything on an application specific level. But it's still Apple's fault, but I stand by the point of them buying TomTom not helping the bail out the boat they're in.
They're using Tomtom's dataset, it's not like buying the company would improve the quality of the dataset.
"User experience fully depends on the choices these manufacturers make."
"We are confident about our map quality, as selling 65 million portable navigation devices across the world and more than 1.4m TomTom apps for iPhone in the past two years reaffirms this quality."