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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

This may just be my bubble, but even among my iPhone-owning friends, I haven't seen a single person use Apple Maps in Europe, so I wouldn't be surprised if the efforts to improve the map data have been more focused on the US.

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German here and me and my wife almost exclusively use Apple Maps, mainly because it looks and feels nicer. The differences in navigation are miniscule, but if we want to really check the traffic before we start we do a quick glance at Google maps. One difference in navigation we noticed is, that Apple Maps gives some small local streets - those just one revel above "Feldwege" (agricultural/forestry roads) - more weight than they should have. They are not really "single track" (almost unheard of in Germany) but come close, with no lane delineation dashes, etc.

Also in Germany, also using exclusively iPhone with carplay. Not perfect, but light years better than google maps.

I’m in Europe. I use it as part of Apple CarPlay for all my navigation and I think it’s much better than Google Maps (for car navigation, at least)

Really depends on where you are in Europe. Out here in the boonies of Portugal, it’s excellent if you’re driving a 4x4 pickup truck, which is the only vehicle of mine I use it with, as it picks very direct routes, which often involve ridiculously steep muddy dirt tracks, very narrow bridges, and generally just very underused farm tracks.

I tried using it in Bosnia, once, and it decided to use an abandoned airfield landing strip as a shortcut. Wild stuff.

So it was at least concrete / tarmac instead of mud?

Concrete. Used the opportunity to do some doughnuts before continuing on our journey.

This is my exact experience, but with Google Maps. Constantly suggesting gravel (or worse) side roads instead of highways and hallucinating multiple turn lanes etc on a country road about 1 car wide. It's been a few years, but I still remember the time I was in Berlin and buses didn't run due to bad weather, but I had a flight to catch so I had to walk to the Tegel airport and the route Google maps recommended ended up being quite an adventure, having to crawl through a hole in a linked fence on an unlit dead-end road next to the airport.

In the Balkans, both Apple Maps and Google Maps are completely lost.

I frequently drive through Serbia/Bulgaria/Montenegro/Macedonia, and if you ever do, do yourself a favor and install something OpenStreetMap-based.

Otherwise, you will be missing new motorways, get thrown on unpaved roads, or even asked to drive on roads that just do not exist anymore.

Apple Maps uses OSM data in many countries.

Obviously not in these then. Do you know which ones?

No, and as far as I know, they don't say. But a lot of their not-direct-from-OSM map data comes from TomTom, which also ingests OSM. There's a lot of OSM in Apple Maps, as there is in most other non-Googly mapping apps.

tbf google maps are absolutely shit for car navigation.

Apple Maps is absolutely very late to the game when it comes to road closures. Google Maps somehow always knows which roads are closed, even if for a few minutes.

Because users on Waze report it to them for points

Apple Maps does have the ability to make the same reports, but its super buried so I doubt many people even know its possible, let alone where to go to do it.

Also, I'm not sure but if a road that normally has several cars a minute goes to zero cars in five minutes say, it's likely it's blocked.

European here. Been using Apple Maps exclusively for the best part of a decade now.

I changed to it for car navigation. It's a less cluttered interface and integrates better with voice control than Google maps. I still use Google to find out what's around me in a city, which is probably where the money is.

I'm from Europe and I use it 99% of the time. I find the UI in satnav mode much better (cleaner and readable) than the one Google Maps has. The only time I use Google Maps is when I really want to find something that's not in Apple Maps or when I want to read reviews without fumbling with the web browser.

The reason is that Google are highly commercialized first on thier maps, while Apple focused on major markets. E.g. I can remember the times like 2017, when Apple maps was as rocky as possible, but they were working fine in Shenzhen with matching chines to transcriptions, while Google maps sucked at scale there.

I've used it quite a lot in Europe - specifically for walking directions in cities. I prefer Apple Maps for walking directions, especially paired with the watch - the data is good and the UX with the watch is excellent.

It’s quite good in both Spain and UK. Better at public transport than Google Maps.

I believe Apple Maps uses Open Street Map data for the mapping, which it augments with its own data collection. So it shouldn’t be worse than other vendors, like TomTom, who use the same dataset. Google has its own map data that’s probably better than OSM, but I think it probably has the same bias of USA + large international metros focus as Apple.

Google Maps is definitely still a little better but I find the delta is nowhere near as wide as it used to be. The main problem with Apple Maps I find today is that their data on business listings and locations tends to be a little older than Google’s, sometimes even a year or more out of date. So if a business or meeting place you’re trying to get to has moved recently you can wind up in the wrong spot.

Europe here. We have a friend who always gets lost and for that we call him "Apple Maps".

Here in the UK, Apple maps is the only app I use. I dont even use the inbuilt car gps.

Here in the north east of Scotland, I have to switch back and forth between Google Maps and Apple Maps. Apple Maps provides vastly superior residential navigation (it understands that many houses only have names, not numbers, and knows what those names are), but commercial information (where to find a café, are they open, etc.) is often incomplete or outright missing. It seems like Apple have coughed up for POI licensing from OS Maps or similar, but they're limited to whatever business information they can get from Yelp.

yeah, Apple maps isnt so good for tourist info, at least once you leave the big cities. I just use the web version of google maps if Im out travelling somewhere remote

I want to use Apple Maps instead of Google's apps, I'm in Canada.

Apple have been promising bicycle support in Canada since iOS 14. Bike paths and itineraries still aren't there.

It's the same with public transit, which is unsynchronized or unavailable depending on the city.

Apple Maps will show business informations and schedules, but only pull information from Yelp, which no one here uses. The app will guide you to businesses that have closed or moved out, and will show you photos and menus that date 5+ years.

It's not an issue of software quality unfortunately, but one of negligence on the service side.

My wife used Apple Maps for a while here in the UK and driving in Europe. The results varied between amusing and traumatic. No issues ever with Google Maps since she swapped (but I know from experience it's not perfect). Apple maps would send her over tertiary roads through mountain passes that were snowed out, instead of salted/gritted primary roads, would show major highway junctions wildly (dangerously) inaccurately and showed areas that had lots of properly mettled roads as open countryside with no thoroughfares at all.

I can’t reply to sibling comment, but the Apple Maps native integration in the Apple ecosystem is far far ahead of Google’s. Their CarPlay, Watch, notifications, island etc integration shows how all apps should feel, but not even Google can be bothered to have the integration right.

to be frank, I have a feeling that Google has more / better data.

In Germany it's pretty decent, the only thing I still open Google Maps for is to occasionally check reviews or store opening hours.

Well, back in the days, it took Apple 3 years to fix umlauts in PDF documents with VoiceOver. It is pretty much normal that you're being treated as a second-class user if you are not residing in the US. It is a form of digital colonialism. Learn english, move to the US, or suffer the death of a thausand cuts.

Ireland, on Apple Maps for the past decade more or less. Works fine. Once it led me to the wrong place because someone “contributed” that information to the map.

I use Apple Maps all the time if I can, it's just better at being a navigator, but the search UX sucks giant salty balls

in Japan apple maps is commonly used.

Do you have a source that supports this claim?

I haven’t come across anyone using Apple Maps while living in Japan, most seem to use Yahoo! Maps or Google Maps.

The source was my experience living with Japanese friends in Japan for around a month. This was, however, quite a few years ago. I believe that the complexity of the Japanese street naming system may have had something to do with it.

Bold claim based on one month experience. May be living for 10 years and continuing to living here gives different impression.

https://www.reddit.com/r/JapanTravel/comments/xbejr2/apple_m...

Outside of the US Japan is the most saturated Apple's market

It's sub par to google maps. As much as I would like to use it in Japan, but it is crappier than Google.

Noone in my circle with iphone uses it. Most of people are using Yahoo maps, which is way better than google and apple maps combined.

I use it all the time, because its driving directions interface is so much better than Google, it's not even funny. But it is overall worse than Google Maps.

And they are planning to make it even worse with ads, so.

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