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Comment by louthy | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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.

tbf google maps are absolutely shit for car navigation.

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