Google Set to Release iOS Maps App Tonight
allthingsd.com
allthingsd.com
If Apple want to distance themselves from Google, surely they could just not approve any of their apps.
I'm pretty sure there were already stand-alone browser apps in the App Store before Chrome came.
I guess we will (might?) find out soon enough.
I had an iPhone 4S for a few weeks last year and tried the Mapquest app. I found that it was terrible when driving down a freeway. Every time I crossed an overpass, it would assume that I was on the cross street, and recalculate. Then it'd wise up to me being on the freeway again, and recalculate once more. Repeat a mile or two down the road at the next overpass.
I would have figured they'd have implemented some heuristic that considered the likelihood of me traveling 70mph in one direction only to immediately turn onto a cross street. But at the time, that seemed to not be the case.
I realize Google has been adding their own voice recognition to their apps, but there is no easy way to activate it without having to look at the screen; a no-go while driving.
Google is awesome at software. Apple is awesome at hardware, I wish the two weren't competing, as the iPhone was better when they weren't competitors.
As an aside, I tried using the voice search in the YouTube app today and it wasn't working at all.
> Google is awesome at software. Apple is awesome at hardware
I think it would be better said that Apple is awesome at software, Google is awesome at data. Apple hardware, while nice, is nothing to phone home about on its own. I'm not sure an iPhone loaded with Android would really sell all that well.
Does "release" in this case mean they are going to push the button to allow users to download it from the app store tonight? Or have they just submitted it and they are awaiting approval?
Why couldn't they have spent that time getting data partnerships that apparently is going to solve all of their problems?
>>Why couldn't they have spent that time getting data partnerships that apparently is going to solve all of their problems?
I would imagine they have been spending years on this already. Google has just been spending nearly a decade doing the same thing. When you are both world class development companies, a several year lead is insurmountable for a very long time.
I don't have a dog in the race, but maybe I'm realizing why Scott was fired.
The people who want in-situ transit directions, want Google's much superior search experience, and those who got screwed over by Apple not covering their geographic area particularly well - will be happy about this upgrade though.
Disagreed completely. Pretty much the only people who have had a net positive from iOS6 Maps are the people who drive, and thus are able to take advantage of turn-by-turn.
Here in NYC iOS6 Maps is nearly completely useless. Searching for locations by address frequently takes you hundreds of miles away - "24 Orchard" takes you to another state, for example, even if you are standing less than half a mile from the address. Searching for places by name has a worse than 50/50 chance of finding it, and frequently completely unrelated results come up instead. Even when Apple can get the addresses of places correct, it frequently has trouble getting them in the correct locations - I've seen many instances of correct addresses dropping the pin in wrong locations - usually a block or two away.
The disaster of iOS6 Maps goes well beyond the loss of transit directions - the data and search components are atrocious.
The problem with bad mapping is that it has a thresholding effect. The utility of your mapping service does not scale linearly with the quality of your data - once your data is wrong above a certain threshold of all usage, people stop trusting your maps entirely. I do not trust iOS6 Maps because I have no way of knowing if it got anything right, and its failure rate is high enough that I have to second guess everything it tells me. Which is to say, it has become useless.
iOS6 Maps is a disaster for major urban locations in the United States. I for one am waiting for the Google Maps app to drop like a kid on Christmas eve.
As long as your definition of urban locations excludes Philadelphia, Google Maps are just swell.
Your experience, though, explains why Tim Cook felt he needed to apologize.
Locally (Redwood City, Foster City, Mountain View) I prefer to use the IOS 6 Mapping application on my iPhone 5, than, rather than, side-by-side, the IOS 5 Mapping application on an iPhone 4S. Forgetting about Turn-by-Turn (which is the obvious and clear advantage of IOS 6 Mapping) - the super twitchy-fast vector Maps in IOS 6 Maps, not to mention their offline presence made all the difference. Particularly if you get into a sketchy cell area, where the old IOS 5 maps was basically "No Maps" - compared to the IOS 6 Maps which are "No Internet connection required, here are your maps."
While in Redwood City, I send all sorts of queries out to Siri like "Directions to Waterfront Pizza" (It picks the right one up in Foster City), and "Directions to 3463 Page Street" (It's intelligent enough to use the Page Street in Redwood City) - I use maps a lot, and haven't seen any regression beyond what I would see in google maps. IOS 6 maps is as close to flawless as a generic mapping application needs to be for my use in the peninsula area.
I wonder if Apple did something remarkably stupid, and only optimized the Bay Area? If so, then they deserve all the bad press they've received over their mapping application.
It might be interesting to have some third-party do a "Here are 1000 typical queries in 100 typical urban locations" and come back with a scorecard. Given that Apple is pulling a lot of data from TomTom for IOS 6 maps, I would be surprise to see their results much poorer than what TomTom would do give directly.
The old app was Apple's maps app, that just happened to use Google APIs. And of course, to use Google maps data without letting Google show any ads, you have to pay Google. And if you have 400M iDevices, the number you have to pay Google is probably in order of >$50-100M per year (or something like that - I have no idea; just wanted to say that it's a lot). And even after paying that much money, Apple still didn't have turn-by-turn navigation or vector maps (the rumor is that Google wanted more user data and Apple refused).
So, Apple decided that instead of giving Google $500M in the next few years, to spend that money on developing their own mapping technology and be masters of their own destiny. Sadly, the result is laughably worse than Google's data, and probably will be comparable to Google's 2011 sometime in 2014.
It will improve sooner than that. Apple has been rapidly making deals with data providers in each country. They never had those in place at launch which was why it was so bad.
I'm quoting John Siracusa, because I think what he said makes a lot of sense: Google does brute force (i.e., driving cars all over the world and having thousands of real people auditing the maps data), but Apple wants to get its data using "clever" algorithms. Clever algorithms is what caused [1], and countless other issues.
What I said above is debatable, but the next statement is (I think) absolutely non-negotiable: Until we see Apple Maps (or one of its partners') cars driving around the world (the whole world, mind you - not just US and EU), its data will be demonstrably worse than Google's. It might be good and usable, but still will be worse than Google's :)
[1]: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/12/11/apple-fixes-australian-m...
They have cars as well. And they've had them for DECADES before Google. And it's not like Google is driving around continuously updating their data. For example Street View in many parts of my city is over 3 years old and still missing many newer suburbs.
So no. Google does not have a brute force approach. They have just had longer to perfect their algorithms.
See the frequently referenced: http://blog.telemapics.com/?p=399
It's also worth noting that Apple's local POI search has been a particular pain point. Thinking it will be easy to match or outdo Google here (when Google Maps often pops up the right POI as a suggestion when I've typed as few as three characters) is foolhardy.
If you do a POI search e.g. Sydney restaurants in Google Maps you can scroll down to see the attribution e.g. "Business listings distributed by Yellow Pages". Likewise for most other countries.
But hey I will grant you that Google Maps has a better autocomplete.
> And sorry but Google doesn't own any POI data either.
Some of Google's recent acquisitions would beg to differ:
http://www.wired.com/business/2011/09/google-buys-zagat/
http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/13/technology/google-frommers/i...
And, unless you know differently, I'm pretty sure Google owns Google Places...
The Yellow Pages attribution you see doesn't necessarily mean all data came from Yellow Pages, just that some may have.
I think you might be a little bit dated in your understanding. Google any random city on maps.google.com. Look at the fine print at the bottom: "Map data ©2012 Google"
I remember what that used to say a 4-5 years back. Copyright NAVTEQ. They have been quite busy.
Look, don't get me wrong, i'm a big fan of being able to catch up. I was part of a small group of folks that took GCC's compiler technology from late 80's to state of the art in the mid 2000's by cherry picking the best of the best from research of the past 20 years. It worked. In 5-6 years, we were able to get within 1-2% of the best compilers at normal opt levels.
But it still took 5-6 years. Getting good takes time. There is no magic fairy dust. The secret to getting the last 25% of the way there in anything is hard work and lots of tuning. There is no magic bullet that will suddenly fix everything.
Because the mobile version has been available and was about 80% as good as the app. Which really showed just how lacking the original maps was.
Because the fact is that the mobile site IS about 80% as good as the native app. Especially given the native app has poor caching and no offline capability.
Honestly -- the directions are fine. Turn by Turn seems useful (only had it a short while in AU).
The key issue for me is crappy information display. Most of the time -- major roads aren't shown while zoomed out. So If I want to glance at the maps to try an alternate route -- I can't.
I am surprised that Google would even consider putting their maps back on iOS at this point given the publicity but they have never been a very scrutable organization.
And I still might wait for some google maps app reviews before I upgrade...
Yes. Very much so. I was frustrated with the app for a few weeks, then one day driving back from out of state I ran into a closed section of interstate. After half an hour of fighting the app in a convenience store parking lot, I gave up and went inside to buy a road atlas.
I could really rely on google maps to give me good directions and actually show me all the roads sensibly. With my android phone, when I needed to deviate from the calculated route I'd just let my sense of direction lead me around for 15 minutes then look back at my phone, thats how much I trusted it.
Normally maps are integrated into the app (which means at this point supporting IOS6 means integrating Apple Maps)
Google submitted Maps to Apple months ago (although Eric Schmidt remained voluntarily ambiguous and avoided to say it explicitly): http://9to5mac.com/2012/09/25/eric-schmidt-on-google-maps-on... After firing the iOS Maps manager (Rich Williamson), Apple decided to take the only sensible approach of finally pushing a button to let Google Maps in the app store, as a short-term stop-gap solution to end their endusers' frustration.