Google Maps' advantage over Apple Maps

If there's one thing that Apple hates as much as a half-baked UX, it's dependency on another tech company. It seems pretty obvious to me as a casual developer and observer of Google maps over the years that global mapping is really really hard. How could Apple not have known this? I don't think even they have this much hubris.

Now we don't know why negotiations with Google for the maps API failed. Maybe Apple was overconfident, maybe Google was playing hard ball for Android's sake, maybe a bit of both. But regardless of the reason, the contract was not renewed and they had to release something. The iPhone without maps is not the iPhone.

The fact that they used an algorithmic approach to QA says more about the timelines than Apple's beliefs about the overall best approach. There was simply not time to get people on the ground to do a proper QA job. Apple's hands were tied.

This is Apple's "Vista" moment and will inevitably draw the "wouldn't have happened under Jobs" comments. How Apple recovers will form business school study material for years to come.

What insight?

Apple makes most of their stuff themselves -- or gets them from multiple sources.

Maps were an exception, as a key technology that was in the hands of a competitor.

But not because Apple could help it at the time: they made a foray into a new territory, mobile phones, and Google had all the available technology and was a non competitor at the time (the first Android phone was out a year later, Oct 2008).

It's a few years that they have already started the process of moving to something of their own. They bought some mapping companies, etc. Something forced their hands to make the switch before that was over.

In any case, you can't just jump over 8+ years of refinements that Google maps have (not to mention all the "driving endless miles for Google Street View and road info, etc).

If the _best_ Google could come up with was throwing manpower at the problem then anybody else should think really carefully about their solution if it doesn't involve similar manpower.

Given that the Youtube app was also pulled, there's probably some political maneuverings going on. Google pretty much pulled the rug out from under Apple's feet (whether this was Google taking their ball and going home, or Apple's hubris we don't know). If Apple doesn't provide a coherent story in the next few weeks/months, this may actually have a bottom-line impact on the iPhone 5 and iOS6.

Apple has no lack of hubris - in some things they succeed spectacularly beyond all expectations, and in others - well MobileMe, Ping, and now Maps...

We get it, they're bad.

EDIT: Frankly, I think it's pretty hilarious this article is so long and formal.

Read some of the other comments to find out how it can be interpreted.

When you try to compete with an entrenched product that is feature rich and highly polished (such as google maps) you either need to differentiate your product or come to the table with an equal level of polish. Apple has failed to do this. They have made a classic "strategy tax" blunder.

This move is straight out of the playbook of the old, bad Microsoft and the old, bad IBM. It's the sort of fundamentally bad idea that a big, dumb, lumbering company makes. If there's anyone in the world that is happy about this it has to be the people on the surface team at Microsoft. Because it shows how massively vulnerable Apple is to competition now. Whatever magic Apple used to have, it seems to be gone.

Sure, all software works this way. We all know the "release early, release often" mantra. The difference is that Apple replaced functionality that many users depended upon with something completely inadequate. It'd be like Sun or IBM going in and replacing all the super specialized custom microprocessors in your server farm with experimental souped-up 386es. Sure, they're the same type of thing, and hypothetically they should serve the same function, but you don't just go out and replace completely functional stuff without at least the basics firmly in place.

It is clear that Apple released iOS Maps very prematurely, mid-development. This was stupid, and there's really no use splitting hairs about it. Some bugs or problems are to be expected, but a critical function that most of your users depend upon, that has real, serious consequences if failure occurs (lost in a dark alley, etc. etc.) ought to be better than what Apple has put out. Add to this Apple's draconian policies that forbid Google from offering "Google Maps" as a third-party app on the App Store (though I guess today it looks like they may be waffling a bit on this), and you have a very serious problem.

I guess we can say that it may be good for Android adoption. :)

From the article

1. Completeness – Features are absent and some features that are included seem to have erroneous attributes and relationships.

2. Logical Consistency - Expecting the data across different sources to be completely consistent ie 'An example of this could be having a store’s name, street number and street name correct, but mapping it in the wrong place'

3. Positional Accuracy – is considered the closeness of a coordinate value to values accepted as being true

4. Temporal Accuracy – particularly in respect to temporal validity – are the features that they map still in existence today?

5. Thematic Accuracy – particularly in respect to non-quantitative attribute correctness and classification correctness.

The first iPod didn't do a lot, but what it did, it did correctly. If the first iPod had had the scale of quality issues we're seeing out of Apple Maps, there wouldn't have been a second.

And why exactly should Apple care about this? Isn't the vast majority of their profit coming from higher then normal margins on hardware? Their bread and butter is suppose to be making compelling tech products that have high build quality and are easy to use for any type of user. Why would Apple care where ad dollars are going as long as they kept doing what they are suppose to be doing to justify their high margin devices? Apple isn't in the ad business.

Of course, with their map move they've just compromised the quality of one of the core services of a mobile device, that should be a bigger deal then any of this nonsense about location based recommendations being the future of ad revenue.

I don't know the particulars of the agreement they had with Google and other providers, but couldn't Apple have just rolled out their own driving directions application with restaurant and location search services but kept Google on for the time being? This would have allowed them to launch, then roll out a fully fledged Maps application of their own.

Sure, nobody's perfect. There's so much data that problems inevitably slip through.

But Google's maps are at least "good enough" in most important markets. Apple's are not. That is a problem.

Imagine if it couldn't make calls, or got the wrong person when you did call? That would incite a similar emotional response.

"All new edits need to be reviewed by another mapper. The more you successfully contribute to Map Maker, the more trust you will gain in the system and the easier it will be for you to make and review other changes to the map. If your edit is still pending and not on Google Maps, it has likely not been reviewed yet. You can post the links to the edits you’ve made on the review edit requests forum, so that your fellow mappers can review your map changes, enabling your edit to go live once approved by enough people with enough trust in Map Maker. Learn more about how reviewing and the moderation process works here."

Having a lot of relevant questions (and hard data on which answers to those questions were used) is an invaluable resource in bootstrapping mapping and local search together.

Suppose that data source A has a point for “Logan Airport” and data source B has a point (a few hundred feet away) for “General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport” and data source C has a separate data point for every terminal.... on a case-by-case basis it’s not hard to resolve questions like this, but when you try to come up with an algorithm that scales to tens of millions of map features, you spend a lot of time scratching your head saying “why did it do THAT?!?!”