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Comment by st0p | Hacker News Reader

Newsflash: A lot of people live in rural England, rural Ontario and Rural Holland. Besides, it can't find places like central station in Amsterdam (hardly rural). I don't care whether it's the app or the data, I don't care that it's working great in the bay area. What I do care about is that I had a perfectly working mapping solution, and now I have a second class thing that's just not working. I don't know about you, but IMHO having wrong directions is even worse than having no directions.

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Working great in Bay Area? Who told you that?

I was under impression that this all similar to "antena gate" (kinda not big deal), but iOS maps are really really bad even in Bay Area.

EDIT: Here is an example: Search for "428 University Ave, Palo Alto": you will end up in Los Gatos.

Not in my experience. It's fine here, at least in the city and in Berkeley. No problems aside from a few addresses needing me to add "sf" to them to avoid having them go to different cities (which sometimes also occurred with Google's map data).

I'm working on a routing/location based app right now. Out of curiosity could you give examples of what you mean by "really bad"?

Ah, I see that too. Clearly problematic since there doesn't seem to be a way at all to load up the intended 428 University Ave address. No good.

Still though, "really really bad" makes me think you have experienced many other issues. I'm genuinely curious about how Maps performs in the places it is "supposed" to be at least passable. Got any other examples?

Meta: please don't edit your comments to respond to sub-comments. It makes the flow of the conversation very difficult to follow and makes my previous comment seem irrelevant and out of place.

Both David Pogue and Anil Dash have written about getting driving directions that takes them to the wrong location in places like New York city.

I'm just one user, but if a navigation app takes you the right address in the wrong location in a place like the Bay area or NYC, that's a "really bad" problem.

Ironic that as I tested out that address example, I noticed an Apple story across the street from the actual address.

I didn't say it was working great in Bay Area, the person I responded to did... But apparently even that is not true.

"Antennagate" wasn't a big deal? When my wife used her iPhone 4 it would drop calls constantly (pretty decent AT&T coverage, Columbus, Ohio). She even had it replaced due to the issue (which wasn't fixed until she put a case on it).

True, and I granted that point already. However, a lot of people live in China, too, and it's being widely reported that Apple Maps is much better than Google Maps' data, in China. I'll just give one link, but a little googling around proves the point quite well:

http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/gadget/314283/apple-maps-bet...

You didn't have a perfectly working solution before, btw; Google Maps still has a lot of errors.

And what you have now is both Google Maps (via Safari), and also a new Maps app that is internally superior and relies on a less-mature dataset which will mature quickly and give Google some much-needed motivation to improve its data as well. I'm not sure why this is such a big disaster.

Edit: By the way, Apple Maps finds Amsterdam Centraal (not "Central") Station just fine, if you spell it correctly. I just checked; it finds the exact same place as Google Maps.

It is being widely reported based on one source (http://anthonydrendel.com/blog/2012/9/24/ios-maps-and-china....) that gets basic facts wrong.

You didn't have a perfectly working solution before, btw; Google Maps still has a lot of errors.

I don't know if I'd make this comparison. The level of erroneous data in Apple Maps is just insane compared to Google Maps.

Depends on where you live: http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps

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