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Comment by RickS | Hacker News Reader

heh. Could the apple maps team ever be paid a higher compliment? They really, truly, made it. I remember 15 years ago when apple maps was an absolute laughingstock that couldn't hold a candle to the big guys. But look at them now.

They made it genuinely good. It'd been my only map app for years until I downloaded google maps for a road trip and was perplexed by all the squares I didn't ask for telling me about Arby's and Toyota dealers. "People tolerate this?!"

Long enough to be the villain.

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Good for navigation, terrible for up to date business information (opening hours) and reviews.

Google maps’ reviews aren’t great - everything is a 4.3 because they incentivised users to review business interactions they didn’t care about by paying them pennies in Google pay credit - but it will at least tell me reliably if a business is closed today or has shut down.

Agree ++

The network effect of Google Maps is huge. If a restaurant menu isn't officially online, someone will have posted a picture of the menu and half the dishes on it.

Good for navigation? I use as default but never if I’m in a hurry.

Google maps' business/shop/restaurent information is indeed a lot better than Apple maps / Yelp in the UK, however I've found here it relies on business owners to update that info, and so often has "orphaned" businesses / restaurants still in it that have closed months (sometimes more than 6) ago.

Sometimes there's a recent review saying that, but other times there's no indication at all.

That's fair, I agree. But anything that can be contorted into a billboard will be, so that shortcoming is more feature than bug, at least for me. They're just a map, and that's it, which ~~keeps~~ kept them on the right-ish side of Goodhart's law.

The quality of Apple maps is highly dependent on where you live. Every time I check their release notes, I see “we’ve added a custom 3d model for this one landmark in a random US city”, which has zero impact on me or 99.99% of their users. Meanwhile, in my home city it took more than 3 months for a newly opened gym to appear of Apple maps, way way slower than on Google or OSM maps.

Of the big tech companies, Apple is definitely the one that has embraced America First the most. If you live outside the US, you get features later (if at all) and have to pay more for that privilege.

Google Pixel likes to have a word.

(Its redeeming feature is that you can install other OSes though.)

The US is the only market where Apple's blue bubble iMessage empire exists, so its makes sense that they'd try to make Apple Maps tolerable to use for users there.

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