It sure is nice having Justin O'Bierne writing publically about maps again. His old 41Latitude blog was phenomenal and then got blackholed when he went to work at Apple Maps. Then he left Apple and is back in the free world and doing phenomenal analysis of digital mapping like this article. I can't wait for him to finish his book.
??? He writes a lot of this article like he's trying to guess from press and outside observation what Apple is doing / planning. If he was JUST working there, wouldn't he know all this? Should his 'outside observations' be considered to be him fitting outside information to what he already knows?
I'm not overly surprised that Google have added so many buildings in such a short time... This IS the same company that re-encoded the whole YouTube corpus (which while small at the time was still a considerable about of content) in a weekend to improve the user experience (SD -> HD launch).
Up to a point. At that point an autonomous system needs to be able to interpret and react to the physical world as it actually is at the moment as opposed to how it's supposed to be.
This is why efforts based on exhaustive mapping make me nervous. Things change, sometimes rapidly. The vehicle should be using its maps as a general guide, not as some kind of ground truth.
The vehicle should be using its maps as a general guide, not as some kind of ground truth.
Not to sound like a jerk, but I would be shocked if there were anyone working on this that was not pursuing things in this way. It just seems kind of obvious that you can't have some big hunk of metal rolling around, following some abstracted track from a map, without "looking" where it is going.
Cars obviously have sensors for real-time data capture. However, the question is how well they handle new signage/lights, road changes, construction, flooded lanes, etc. when those aren't in the database. It's fair to say that autonomous driving today is some point between "we run 100% off maps" and "we can handle things like a human could if we lost access to our maps." (And much closer to the former.)
And yet we have Waymo building 2cm-resolution maps and not operating outside of mapped areas, and (more scarily) Tesla geotagging false positives where Autopilot misidentifies some roadside feature and panic brakes.
Yes. Cast your mind to lightly-traveled rural roads. If you are driving one of the many unpaved roads in Arizona during flash flood season, and the last car through was a couple hours ago, will you bet your life that the road is still there?
But hey, that's not a realistic danger in the city, right? Well, look up the sinkhole named "Steve" that opened up in the middle of an Oakland, CA freeway.
Then there's Highway 1, which is known for landslides. Not to mention that little incident with the Bay Bridge back in '89...
Are those approaches mutually incompatible? It seems to me that it would be easier to build a system which can drive fast when what it's seeing matches what it's expecting to see (most of the time), and which falls back to a much more conservative stance in the case of surprisal (i.e. expectation not matching observation).
Good point, the map is not the territory and the cars are engaging with the territory.
Another interesting thing to consider, should there be widespread use of autonomous vehicles is the absolutely massive deployment of digital sensors that would entail, and who would use this data and to what ends? It would basically be realtime Streetview.
There's a fairly steady stream of posts here about data/privacy/etc. It's easy to pillory companies for violating privacy rules in various ways or mishandling data. However, given that data can't be reliably anonymized and that a lot of things that happen in public have simply never been systematically recorded in the past, there are a lot of fundamental questions over what sorts of data should be recorded when they provide legitimate value to users.
As a hypothetical, what if autonomous driving is seen to depend on what many would see as invasive data collection and monitoring? Should it be permitted? That's a hypothetical, but I don't think there's an obvious answer to the question as posed.
If it's the type of autonomous cars that are prototyped today, they are definitely going to be dependent on invasive data collection.
Does it get sent back to the mothership? How is it processed? Is it discarded? Who has access?
When data is the new oil, these questions answer themselves if there is not legislation to prevent it.
Such data would be hugely attractive for commercial interests.
Hedge-funds and the like, use aerial imagery to get data like the amount of cars in parking lots at shopping areas.
With a fleet of cars with 360 degree cameras driving around, not only could the number of people on the sidewalks be counted, but it would be technically possible to identify most of them.
I feel that in the long run the answer is going to be heavily biased towards automated driving - unautomated driving kills. Every year more than a million of people worldwide die for no good reason, just because we suck as drivers; currently automated driving isn't yet superior, but in the long run it will clearly be so.
I don't think that we'll ever justify that massive loss of privacy is more important than massive loss of life and health; especially if the bad consequences of loss of privacy is generally hypothetical and in the future; and the bad consequences of traffic accidents are obvious and immediate.
Google maps is improving since the day I first saw it - that must have been around 2003 or so. The improvement on the data is phenomenal if you look at it over then past 10+ years; The amount of times I blindly trust GM to go somewhere increase every year. I suspect the edgecases will be solved slowly, like navigating to a shop inside a mall, a market stall, an ad-hoc gathering, a planned building, et cetera.
Typing in an address, going there by directions, verifying the building front without extra time needed for travel is truly magic.
This is all true, but of course there will always be a few missing features that seem so obvious and useful that you wonder why they still don't have them.
For me it's one or two announcements of the actual destination address at the end of the drive. If it's not an address I'm familiar with and not a business with a sign out front, by the time I get there I've usually forgotten the street number!
But when I arrive all I hear is "your destination is on the right."
It would be so great if the last two announcements were:
"Your destination, 123 Main Street, will be on the right in 800 feet."
"Your destination, 123 Main Street, is on the right."
For me the problem with Google Maps is how appallingly badly it fails when things go wrong. The offline mode is prone to silently getting locked in "rerouting" and just completely leaving me hanging for 10 minutes at a time. And if it loses gps signal, it doesn't seem to think the driver needs to know about this. A
Silent failure is terrible.
I was driving once, with a Google Maps engineer giving directions. We had flown thousands of miles to visit a place, which we had visited the day before. During the second drive over, from the hotel, he expounded on the awesomeness of Maps (which is truly awesome, don't get me wrong) right up until his phone said "Your destination is on the left" and all we had was a fence with a grass field on the other side. We were looking for a complex of buildings we had seen before, so this was clearly not correct.
To his credit, he immediately started thinking through what had gone wrong, but it was so awesome to be a witness to that moment.
The best is when it has GPS but spotty cell service and you miss a turn because "turn right onto $longname $state $many_syllable_route_number" is actually a yield that doesn't require you to stop and you need to turn left/right onto $other-street before it's done telling you to do what you just did. Then it tries to re-route you but 3g service is too spotty to do that but not to spotty to get so far along in the process that it discards the old route you just made a U-turn and got back onto.
My biggest complaint about Google Maps is that it changes its scale as you get closer to a turn. You try to judge how close you are by how fast you've been approaching it, and suddenly you find you've zoomed past.
My best experience with google maps was actually finding a restaurant inside of Kyoto or Tokyo mainstation. Google maps navigated me perfectly across all floors and knew all stairs I had to take.
I launched Google Maps for mobile in 2005. In 2006, Eric Schmidt was worried that Yahoo Go was a killer app. My claim that Google Maps was the real killer app fell on deaf ears. :)
This is a total non sequitor, but huh, your last comment on this account was in 2012. Do you use others, or just only speak when you feel you have something incredibly cool (which this tidbit certainly is!) to add?
That's what I remember about it too. It was such a drastic improvement over the old MapQuest site where you'd have to click arrows around the edges of the map and wait for it to load to scroll around the map. I was immediately sold on it (even though I was still just printing out directions to take with me in the car).
Why not? How do you define "killer app"? Maps is one of my very highest used apps, alongside chat/text/email. I'd say it's more revolutionary than all of those, because chat/text/email were just mobile versions of apps perfected on desktop, but a mobile map app shows you exactly where you are, which changes everything. I've traveled internationally both in the pre- and post- smartphone era, and let me tell you, travel is way easier now.
It really is something. If you've never seen it, switch to satellite and start scrolling out. That's realtime cloud information that appears and as you keep going you get realtime night/day location rendering (complete with artificial lighting) and then realtime locations for all the major bodies in our solar system (which you can then hop over too and take a look at) (Edit: Ok, maybe this isn't locations of the bodies but you can still hop over to them and look around. The earth/sun location seems right though). Everyone I show this to has never seen it but the Google engineers that work on this stuff clearly care about what they are putting out.
I stopped using Google Maps on the desktop a while back because it would kill a octo-core AMD system with 12GB of RAM in Chrome. Bing Maps might not be better as a map, but the best map is the one that loads and lets you scroll, right?
I switch to Apple Maps on mobile when Google stopped letting me search for directions without signing in.
Incredible piece of technology, destroyed by real bad product decisions.
Could whoever disagreed with the person above me please articulate themselves as to why? I found it to hold a fair point. Just curious why these kind of comments aren't welcome.
I wouldn't even know my own neighbourhood as well as I do without Google maps. One of, if not the single most impressive digital feats freely available to all on the internet.
I remember when Google maps first came out in like 2005 or so. It was a truely revolutionary app.
Not just for being one of the first apps to be properly dynamic and AJAX based, but also because it was possibly the first time that we had access to an entire world of satellite maps online, something previously reserved for large corporations and governments.
Lately I have even been wanting an operating system that has maps as the main UI, or a majorly core feature. With the amount that I use maps, it is an absolute pain to have to switch to it all the time.
I pin every place recommendation I find in my social circles online and tag them with who suggested them. When I'm driving I'd like to pin/note places I see without interacting with the phone. When I'm flying I wan't to know what specific features I am seeing from the air (towns, mountains, lakes). When I'm on a road trip I want to hear snippets of info about the small towns that I'm passing through or the things I see out the window. When I'm walking I want to use the camera for input and output to the map to pin and locate myself. When I'm indoors I don't want to feel lost again or ask where the restroom is.
Location has become a core part of my interaction with the world but it still feels rather basic as a 3rd party app on my phone. Or another tab on my desktop.
Things like this make me think that it's a shame humanity is duplicating all this work instead of collaborating to do it once. One of the awkward failures of capitalism, I guess.
At least when your product is something physical you end up with twice as many outputs. When it's just data you just do the same work twice.
Isn't open street maps exactly that? I guess the shame is that big corporations don't all contribute to that rather than try to compete? It is a thought provoking idea but I struggle to see which side I prefer. I think competition is one of the things that drives innovation.
> Mapzen is an open and accessible mapping platform...Based out of the Samsung Accelerator, we support the geo community through building tools and collaborating on open source mapping projects. We believe that a healthy mapping ecosystem is one that is diverse, sustainable, and accessible to all.
I think I understand what you mean but I think that is actually the proper functioning of capitalism not a failure. If Apple/TomTom/etc. didn’t create maps, Google wouldn’t invest resources in making theirs better.
As the article shows, there's always some subjectivity in mapping. It is essential that there be competition and different approaches to that enormous task.
Agreed! That's a big reason why I've enjoyed working with colleagues on a fully "open" approach to mapping software and data at Mapzen: https://mapzen.com/blog/our-magna-carto/
Competition is a feature, not a bug -- you're recalling a trope that has been a reactionary criticism to Adam Smith for centuries now, and was a core tenet of Marx's ideas -- that with a little central planning, there wouldn't be all of this effort wasted on competition. The original communists really believed that a planned economy would be more efficient once enacted. The fascists believed in the same basic inefficiency argument, but they thought that the government could control it while stil maintaining private property and traditional social structures. In comparison to those two, neoliberal economic theory has done pretty well for itself.
> When it's just data you just do the same work twice.
Monocultures are dangerous too.
People differ on what to measure and how. Competition gives us an opportunity to try something new and potentially better. Especially when there isn't a network effect (e.g. phone protocols).
Also, the cost of this mapping apparently isn't especially high.
> One of the awkward failures of capitalism, I guess.
No, it's actually a feature: competition. With a single product in every category it would be impossible to have diversity of ideas being tested and competing.
Here’s the thing though - if everyone shared data, they could compete on the UX. Nobody says that pharmaceutical companies aren’t competitive on the end product, but they have a shared data set in the form of all the university research. Of course they get their own data, but being “free” to not have to do basic research themselves means they can put more resources towards the end product than data gathering
>And what would be the incentive to create such data if there's no economic gain from it? //
If the data is useful then there is an _economic_ gain, just not necessarily a profit.
If you meant "if there's no profit from it" then it was spoken like a true capitalist.
Why do anything if you're not going to be paid for it.
Why visit your mum in hospital? Why give money to the homeless for food? Why create software for others? Why teach a child a fun game? Love, altruism, interest, expediency, fun, ... and a million other reasons besides.
I've worked on OSM, AFAIK I've got nothing back from having done so other than learning a little about maps.
Your position is flawed, because you're focussing on a single element of a social system. If I invest in mapping, it doesn't remove resources, it improves them for everyone. Without the waste of resources of solely profit-driven activity then we have ample resources to meet basic needs and develop technologically too.
No, I don't yet know how such a system can work. I've been working on it ... transition is the biggest problem and the one I've been addressing. At some point I hope it will benefit us all as a species - probably at a financial loss to me and many others.
"Time from volunteers" isn't enough to buy satellite images, cars with cameras, airplanes with cameras, etc.
We're not talking about a bunch of people pitching in some time as they feel about doing it, we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars (probably more) spent on this.
But, as you wouldn't invest your retirement funds in such a company, why would you expect others to do so?
We, humans, currently spend the resources on those things through the medium of fiat currency. Remove the necessity for profit, the need to pay a lot of people in that system incredibly more than they require - take a couple of dozen 8-figure mansions, a few 9-figure yachts, several hundred 6-figure cars, gold-plated taps, diamond-encrusted tiaras, etc., etc., and the resources targeted at the problem of producing maps go much further. And there's no reason not to have a competitive element, you don't need profit to create competition.
It's not spending people's retirement, it's spending the same resources we spend now, just not mediated in the same manner and without the waste of 40% spend on advertising (plucked that number out my ass but a few years ago pharma was spending more on advertising than on R&D) and without allowing controlling elements to steal all the output for personal gain.
So, I'd like to spend the equivalent resources we do now, but with saving on profit, over-paying wages, and de-duplication of effort. That gives much more resources applied to the actual task without touching pensions (which of course I'd like to see have the same effect).
The problem, is that moving to such an economic system requires the most greedy, most powerful, to be usurped. Humans are greedy (myself included), that leads us to waste so, so, much of our resources.
Why do you think a system where people choose the collective good (having all their needs met) - "volunteering" - rather than personal financial gain can't produce satellites, or any other good/technology we now produce?
> And there's no reason not to have a competitive element, you don't need profit to create competition.
This is where you're getting things wrong. We need competition to advance. Resources are limited and we compete for those resources. Competition is a resource-allocation system.
Sure, you can advocate for a centrally-planned pipe dream as much as you want, it doesn't work. It has been tried many times before, to horrendous results every single time.
> Why do you think a system where people choose the collective good (having all their needs met) - "volunteering" - rather than personal financial gain can't produce satellites, or any other good/technology we now produce?
For the same reason that unicorns can't fly: they can't even exist.
This seems to be attacking a strawman. The original comment was bemoaning the duplicated effort instead of cooperation amongst parties.
If you had a single company, you wouldn't have 10 teams doing the exact same job. The competition here isn't fruitful because so much of the work is shared. Competition is more effective when there is a diversity of approaches.
^^ This. Competition in this way shakes out inefficiencies inherent to an approach that would otherwise linger and soak of resources the the dynamics of path dependence.
And how many approaches do you think there are in mapping? Street View, satellite, 3D modeling from airplane flights, manual mapping, etc. These are all different approaches being used more or less by all players.
Think about how mapping was done before Google. Competition is exactly why we have Google Maps, and why Google Maps is continuously improving, instead of just sitting on its advantage.
Not only competition here has been extremely fruitful, it has made maps freely available to consumers.
Do you remember how much the TomTom app used to cost?
It seems like we are talking about different things. No one is arguing that there shouldn't be multiple map interfaces, but rather that if the data was shared, you could have more investment in the interesting parts.
I'm glad that Nvidia and AMD compete to build better graphics chips, I'm also very glad they both work with a shared, cooperative standard (PCI-E) so I can plug them into my computer. They've chosen to compete on some areas and cooperate in others.
The parents are suggesting, hey, wouldn't it be nice if _everyone_ contributed data to OSM, and then competed on providing the best interface on top of that, rather than constructing data moats. Is it realistic that Google would do this? Of course not. But if 10 companies are all constructing their own data completely independently, that's an awful lot of duplicated work that could be avoided.
> It seems like we are talking about different things. No one is arguing that there shouldn't be multiple map interfaces, but rather that if the data was shared, you could have more investment in the interesting parts.
Data is the interesting part. And it needs more investment. Data is the valuable part. UX has very little relevance here.
Companies are competing on what matters and what gives them a competitive edge. Map UX doesn't. Map data does.
I’m not saying it’s wise for them to give up their advantage - more lamenting that there doesn’t seem to exist an organizational structure that could provide the underlying data as raw resources without a profit motive; we have to hope that the incentives for both the business and the user align (which in maps basic case it does, but with so much user tracking happening for ads I wonder how long until the incentives will stay aligned).
Isn't it just as wasteful to have twice as many designers & programmers & market researchers & behavioral researchers working on two competing UX systems?
If they’re going to design program and research to make the same thing while competing then sure it is.
Coke and Pepsi have been around for a long time, despite sharing the same set of ingredients that any other soda maker can use. Their value comes from marketing and distribution systems.
Well, precisely. And what value is added by massive resources devoted to convincing people to to drink one of two nearly identical products? How much effort might be saved if two nearly identical bottling & distribution systems could instead collaborate and reduce the waste incurred?
By stating "collaborate on X so that we can focus or compete on Y" merely adds one more turtle to to the the stack. You need to take a step back and ask these sorts of questions:
Does competition solve any problems that cooperation does not, or solve them better?
Do problems arise in competition that would not under cooperation?
Is there a 3rd alternative?
What about competition that pursues what's best for everyone, even if it is worse for the individual company pursuing it? (arguably not possible when corporate officers have a fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interest of the company, which presents a conflict)
In situations where most of the cost to set up a business is upfront, the marginal cost is very low and you can't "move" the immobilized capital after (like power lines, train lines, water main, fiber optic networks), there is a massive advantage to the first entrant (the "incumbent").
In these cases, there are massive barriers for new entrants: any new entrant would have to make an immense investment with zero chance of making it back, as the incumbent could just retaliate by lowering prices and driving the entrant out of business.
This situation means that there is little chance that competition will happen, so it is the best interest of society to mandate the operation of the infrastructure from the service. That's what happens with local-loop unbundling, or when the ownership and operation of the rail infrastructure must be separate from the ownership and operation of train lines and services.
That is not the case with mapping the world: anyone can do it, and having an incumbent doesn't block new entrants. There were already many incumbents when Google entered the mapping business, and there's still plenty of competition.
Therefore, there is no reason to mandate separation.
I have a degree in economics and it's definitely just your opinion, man. But it all ends up being very philosophical and "what's the kind of world you want to live in" type stuff. I'm glad to leave it at agree to to disagree.
This is the wrong way to think about things. Competition is good.
If it weren't for the need to compete, would Google have spent billions on innovations like Street View, Satellite imagery, Google Earth, etc. Or would they have just said, "MapQuest has won the internet maps game, let's just let MapQuest do their own thing. No use in doing the same work twice,"
I think you slightly missed the parent comment's point, which is not that they should have walked away but rather have said "man, we really want better maps and imaging for navigation, MapQuest has a great head start, we should work with them to make it even better". I'm not sure what economic model encourages that sort of behavior, though.
Agreed. Yet this sort of sharing has happened in some fields - for example, with game engines. Which I never thought I'd see, way back when. The best of these now tend to be opened up (for royalties.) Perhaps that needs to have more regulatory or government encouragement; although like yourself I'm not quite sure how to do that and still keep incentives in place. Particularly where only one or two firms are really competitive.
What if all the data was public and shared and different people could build their own representations. What if everyone collaborated?
I disagree with the competition is always good. There are many cases where you are duplicating work. The best standard rarely wins (PCI vs MCA .. MCA was superior in many ways technologically .. was even hot pluggable, but PCI had better licensing).
We get into a lot of repetition and the 'best' product rarely wins. It's more about marketing your product in a way people desire it. Example: Beats Audio Headphones.
Please don't conflate competition and diversity. Competition is not a condition to diversity. I'd say that competition enforce a trade off between diversity and concentration of power.
Not quite. I think "competition" is overly glorified, but it does some things well. In this context, routing around path dependence is a key benefit. The upstart competitor in a field doesn't have to "waste" a decade of investment & infrastructure to bypass a methodology that has reached its maximum utility. The old method was cheaper for the incumbent to maintain, no amount of good will and collaborative spirit would convince them to turn their back on it for an unproven alternative. Any industry that has ever been "disrupted" is an industry shaken out of path dependence
The reuse value of this kind of data is critically dependant on the methodology used to create the data. A lot of Google data tends to understandably be focused on their own products and lack quality in a more generic sense. Something as simple as a building outline can be represented in several different ways depending on what you need and require a completely different methodology. The building outline needed by law enforcement is different to what an architect or pizza delivery company needz.
When specific about the type of data there is a lot less competition than you might expect. And for commercial companies it makes sense to make as much money as possible front that.
I'm still wondering why Waze doesn't incorporate Google Maps data and Google Maps doesn't incorporate Waze traffic data? Or does this already happen since Google has owned Waze for a while now? If not, I find it strange for the two to continue to be silo'd.
I've heard stories, guesses, and claims that the current traffic data shown on google maps is potentially aggregated from smartphone GPS and accelerometer readings on android phones or though their Google apps. It's crazy and amazing to just think about it.
I always thought this was officially a feature of maps ?
I worked for a couple of years in a valley with only 2 access points.
Quite often, when it is time to go back home, the trafic would be jammed.
I activated Google Now (or at least I think it was already called that way ?) and without fail it would warn me that there is no point in leaving the building right now since everything was jammed.
Is there a reason anyone uses Apple Maps, aside from wanting to avoid Google out of principle/privacy/monoculture concerns? To be clear, these are entirely legitimate reasons, but I was wondering if the product has any direct benefits for the user (which is a coherent subset of reasons given the modal users' level of concern about systemic issues).
I'm not trying to randomly snipe at Apple here, I just know very little about Apple Maps beyond the bad press its gotten and Apple's general software product competency weaknesses.
EDIT: Thanks for the responses, that's all pretty much the kind of thing I was wondering about
I would like to use it for these reasons, and also that the Apple Maps UI just feels a little nicer to me than the Google Maps app on iOS. There's also the unfortunate fact that Apple doesn't allow users to select a default maps application, so Apple maps integrates better with Messages and other 3rd party apps.
But even with all of these reasons, Google's data and search capabilities are so much better than Apple's that they make Apple Maps feel unusable by comparison.
Really? Google Maps used to ask me if it should remember where I was parked (as of last year). Last week I noticed while visiting Google Maps when waiting in line to checkout that GMaps had automatically labeled where I was parked without input from me.
If I'm being 100% honest, no, other than better integration into the iOS ecosystem. For me, Apple Maps is pretty terrible all around. It feels like it was designed by a group of people that don't actually drive anywhere.
Issues:
- Search results are terrible compared to Google's.
- While the UI is generally smoother, it lags behind (i.e. It shows a turn a good bit after I do). This is especially frustrating when driving through small city blocks and trying to be in the correct lane for the next turn.
- Lane guidance was finally added, but no way to see ahead like in gmaps.
- Day/night mode is very fussy. When I'm driving through the Bay Bridge at night it constantly flips back and forth between day/night due to the overhead lights.
- It is pretty frustrating that the line ahead of me is constantly wobbling around instead of matching the curve/line ahead of me. It feels disorienting and makes it difficult to see if there's an upcoming left/right ahead. Google generally does a good job trying to visually match what you're seeing. https://imgur.com/a/t3Sxm
- If I check traffic when I wake up, then go through my morning routine, then check it again, there's a 90% chance it'll crash on startup.
It's probably both. Apple Maps is lighter on the battery, but I'd assume it uses the GPS too since it uses the battery harder than would be expected with just keeping the screen on.
Google Maps doesn't work well at all on one of my Macs. In Safari, the 2D view works, but the 3D view doesn't work. In Chrome, the satellite tiles are all black (but the roads are visible). In Firefox, the satellite and roads are both black.
It's the same (and most recent) version of all these browsers as my other Mac, where it works fine. How does one debug this? I've tried googling (ha) for every combination of words I can imagine. Google's tech support seems basically nonexistent, for their free services.
Or I can just open Maps.app, and it always works. The data isn't as good but it's not terrible, and at least the basics work fine. I'm not a heavy maps user so that's good enough for me.
Yes, that works, in all browsers. I assumed it's something related to 3D graphics, but that doesn't really help me with troubleshooting it. Other WebGL demos (like the famous ball-in-water one) work fine. Only Google Maps is broken.
1. Google’s Material UI is a total dumpster fire and I use it only as a last resort.
2. Apple Maps integrates much better with everything else I’m using, so the experience is smoother (e.g., looking up an address on my laptop and then sending directions to my phone).
I keep Google Maps around as a backup, mostly for places of interest way out in the boonies, like hiking trailheads.
Do you have any coherent reasoning behind your characterization of Material as a "total dumpster fire"? Other than "I don't like it and thus it must be bad?"
A large part of it is certainly my personal preferences. And even if Material were itself good, completely disregarding the UI pattern the rest of the phone follows in your apps to implement your own is still going to be jarring.
I use Apple maps for navigation and Google maps for looking. Apple maps's navigation does basic things like tell me what the next exit on the freeways, even thought it's twenty miles away, so I have some idea what I need to do next. It knows that in the UK, roundabouts go by the city the road goes to next (on signs), instead of Google which uses road names (not on signs, useless). It tells me right before I need to turn, unlike Google which I always misinterpret. Apple maps seems to label the major roads better. Google maps seems to have decided that things like freeway numbers aren't necessary until you zoom in really tight, which is extremely unhelpful when driving.
Google maps, however, knows where everything is, everywhere. Also, you can download offline maps and get navigation in the middle of nowhere.
On iOs/mobile, Apple Maps has a much prettier, more usable UI. All the buildings are shown 3d in Bay Area during navigation. Google maps does not show 3d while navigating. From this point of view, Apple offers a superior user experience. That's why I use it.
I switch to Google when traffic is really bad, as I trust its timing estimates more.
tl;dr - Google Maps has buildings and Areas of Interest (streets with more businesses) based on satellite & street view data.
"Google is creating data out of data ... It makes you wonder how long back Google was planning all of this—and what it’s planning next"
My guess is that they weren't planning it. Somebody decided to use their 20% time to learn TensorFlow and process the Street View imagery for fun, and that side project got promoted into Maps.
When I downloaded 10 years of church notice sheets, I was trying to get the lyrics of the songs in Chinese. I later realised that I could also find the most common song names, and then focus my Chinese-learning on those songs. Big data is all about gathering more data than you know what to do with, and figuring it all out as you go.
I reckon Google's 3D building designer, that allowed people to plot buildings and place them on the map was used to train an AI to create buildings from features ... maybe. The page says satellite data, matched with street level, but I often see planes flying over my UK city and imagine they could do radar or similar tracking to match with visual data.
This was definitely planned, only perhaps not in this kind of detail. The Geo organization's motto paralleled the company's (to organize the world's information, etc. etc.), only at a geospatial level.
The data you see in Google Maps came and probably still comes from a pipeline of pipelines that rebuild the whole planet on a regular schedule. Since we're talking about all of Earth, random stuff here and there could cause hiccups and delays. Information comes from all sorts of sources, including custom HW (streetview camera, etc.), flying their own planes, owning a satellite company for a few years, and so on.
In one shape or another, it all predates Tensorflow by years.
I do not get what makes this post so popular. Google Maps is often better and uses automatically extracted features from photogrammetry. Eh. 350 points at most.
I accidentally used Apple Maps once as I was going to a (new) doctor's office. I realized I was using Apple maps halfway through my drive and I joked with myself that it wouldn't bring me to the right place. I was heading to a fairly large medical complex in Orange County (CA) and I sort-of had an idea of where I was going anyway, but boy, was I wrong.
According to Apple maps, the doctor's office was literally in the middle of a field. I missed it the first time around (drove past it for a few miles, following my GPSs instructions) and then soon realized that I was already going through residential areas.
Never again, Apple. For context, this was 3 months ago. This doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve. My guess is that Apple just gave up.
In Singapore the Apple Maps capabilities seem to be a little better, after they introduced bus lines a couple of months ago I’m using it as my main guide to go around the city or when I’m lost. The general direction is always correct, points of interest or businesses are sometimes missing, but it feels like they’re improving, so I don’t think they gave up on it. I think they just don’t put so much effort on it compared to Google, because the data gathered from the service doesn’t have the same value for Apple.
The problem in Singapore is that Apple (or whoever they contract this to) hasn't updated major parts of the city in several years - Go take a look at Maxwell Road near the Singapore Chinese Cultural Center connecting to Central Blvd from Straits Blvd - that road hasn't been there since 2015 (at least, maybe longer) - but Apple Still says that it exists and uses it for directions.
Maps are one area where Apple has a "meh, good enough" attitude, but Google really seems to want to really bring the next level of quality.
I live in a city in Germany (280k population) where Google hasn’t updated the 2D satellite images since 2004.
A few months ago, they introduced 3D buildings, and Earth shows up-to-date satellite imagery now, but still didn’t update the satellite imagery used in the Maps app.
Worse yet are maps and transit – roads and sometimes entire districts missing, data from somewhere between 2005 and 2009, and no transit data at all.
Every other map service has it all. Apple, Here, Bing, OSM, everything. Google doesn’t.
And yet people here continue using Google Maps, because "it’s the default", and Google Now can only give you estimates from Google Maps.
That's very odd, and unusual for Google - outlier. The place I grew up, Fawn Lake, British Columbia, has had three or four revisions to its satellite pictures since 2008. I watch my mother do construction on her property, and by how many outbuildings there are, I can see that it has been updated in at least the last 2 years. Population about 250 (generous estimate) in the 200 square miles around Fawn Lake.
The big problem with this is, we have a situation where Google maps is very obviously inferior, to all competing solutions – even paper maps are now more up to date – and yet, everyone still uses it. Because it’s the default.
That shows just how powerful the advantage of a default app is, and how at this point, Google Maps is entirely without competition just because it is the default.
Not even when Google Maps sucks do people switch away – often because many don’t even know there are alternatives.
(And btw, this issue isn’t just like that in one German city, Google Maps is here like that in many places).
To offer a counterpoint, I decided to start alternating
between Apple Maps and Google Maps a few months ago and — so far — I haven’t been led astray by Apple Maps. I do live in L.A., however, which is probably among the best case scenarios for Apple Maps at the moment.
Google does have the better product, but for the most part I can see Apple Maps being at least “good enough” for my use, much the same way that Safari, for me at least, is “good enough” compared to Chrome. Unfortunately, anecdotes of Apple Maps underperforming are all too common, and I think Apple needs to keep investing (and probably a lot) if they intend to win users over.
I don't understand why this would be a problem. Apple Maps is not competing with Google Maps. Apple Maps is simply there so Apple can provide turn-by-turn navigation out of the box without paying Google for it. The fact that Google Maps is free to consumers is irrelevant, because it's not free for Apple to bundle with iOS.
Maybe you're both right? I do think there's a different type of competition here. Apple has their own mapping app as a hygiene feature of their platform, whereas Google is building out Google Maps as a platform of itself.
I'm sure Apple would love it if you used Maps so much that it created ecosystem locking, but I doubt Apple is too upset that you downloaded Google Maps on your iPhone.
If it weren't for the fairly deep tendrils Apple Maps has in iOS itself, or if it were possible to change the 'default' maps app to a competitor's, there wouldn't be a particularly compelling reason. As it is, however, using a third-party app sometimes means awkwardly copying and pasting addresses, not having a turn-by-turn map present on the lock screen and so on, so there are compelling reasons against using third-party maps apps.
These limitations are, of course, entirely of Apple's creation.
These limitations are really a byproduct of the deal falling apart between Apple and Google. Apparently, Google wanted access to more user data in exchange for adding turn-by-turn directions to Google Maps. They could not reach a deal, so Apple Maps was hastily created and Google Maps was booted from the default image.
In the end I can understand the limitations on the lock screen because it can be tricky to figure out the right way to give third-party apps special permissions like that. This is not some kind of tacked-on limitation that Apple added, but instead it's something that didn't exist on iOS until Apple added it. Remember that Google Maps, at the time, didn't give turn by turn directions at all never mind on the lock screen. Given how cautious Apple has been with the iOS permissions model (compared to Android, for sure) this shouldn't be even slightly surprising.
The fact that you can't make Google Maps the default handler is stupid, though.
> In the end I can understand the limitations on the lock screen because it can be tricky to figure out the right way to give third-party apps special permissions like that
Interestingly enough, I did some exploring into how Apple was doing this and it seems like there's already an (internal) "API" for bundles of code that work on the home screen and lock screen. Currently it's taken advantage of by apps like Assistant (Siri), ChatKit (I assume this is Quick Reply notifications?), Wallet (which shows up on the lock screen), and the Wi-Fi picker in addition to Maps. Check out /System/Library/SpringBoardPlugins if you're curious.
The amusing thing is that although Android theoretically allows you to change your default map application, no one would do that since Google Maps is installed by default, and it's so much better than anything else out there (as illustrated by the article above).
i so badly want apple maps to be good enough but it's not there yet. maps is the only google product i use regularly (i use apple maps maybe 20% of the time).
apple has hundreds of billions in the bank, so they could easily fix the problem if they wanted to. but they (mistakenly, imho) don't see it as core to their business so it limps along like it does.
The problem with maps is that in order to be reliable, they need to work everywhere - in familiar areas, people know where they're going; but it's the weirder parts where they start to really care about the accuracy of maps. It's not sufficient for you not to be lead astray in LA, the question is whether you're sure enough to rely on it when driving through a rural area in the middle of USA or on a business trip overseas to a country you've never been to - can you be sure that you can just type in your destination, follow the directions, and actually get where you should be even if you have no idea about any of the landmarks?
I can't be certain of that with any maps app. It's not as though I've never had the occasional problem with Google Maps, and even if I didn't, surety is an impossibly rare thing.
With Google Maps I feel I'd have greater confidence for its accuracy, but placing complete confidence in any maps app would be a mistake.
Google Maps has sent me astray a few times as well. Strangely, I've had the worst experience with GM in the Bay area.
Going to the Golden Gate Recreation Area, Google Maps sent me to a trailhead parking lot instead of the visitor's center. And for a small business near the Bay Model, GM directions stopped about half a mile away, and the map pin was on top of the Bay Model building.
The problem I have with GM is that it will often send me past my destination, then have me do a U-turn, in an apparent attempt to make sure the building is on the right side of the street. Even if there is no center divider and a left turn lane. Even if there is a traffic-light-controlled intersection to get me into the parking lot of the building.
Starting Google directions while on a highway often includes a few unnecessary steps of how to get on the highway that I’m already traveling on. Worse though, recently my girlfriend brought up some Apple Maps directions and it suggested a 5 mile U-turn to get onto the road we were already on.
i had bad experiences with Uber and Lyft in the Bay Area, and mostly because of Google Maps and lousy GPS chipsets on the bargain basement phones everyone seemed to be using. GPS that was taking forever to lock on, so drivers were missing turns and having to backtrack.
here in Texas, different story. Although Google Maps isn't always that great with the parallel service roads that we have all over the place.
Interestingly, Apple maps seems to have more accurate maps in some places like Chiang Mai, Thailand. I've noticed locals there using Maps instead of Google Maps
I usually use Google maps, but after being led astray like 3 times while visiting LA recently, switched to Apple maps there. Google maps seemed basically broken in LA while I was there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was using Apple Maps a few weeks ago, and wanted to get something to eat. I saw a place called “Shake Shack” and decided to go there. Not only did it not exist, I checked online, there has never been a Shake Shack in my town, there’s only a handful in my country.
How Apple Maps got that wrong, I honestly don’t know. Where did the data come from, and why is it that incorrect?
I reported it, and it’s since been removed, but I can’t do that for everything in my town, and there’s so much missing; I can’t report that, or edit the map like you can on OpenStreetMap.
Honestly, why does Apple Maps exist? Either it needs to be like Google Maps (and just work), or be like OpenStreetMap and let Apple fans edit the map and get more involved.
I gave them a lot of patience and understanding years ago (mapping the world is hardly an easy task), but my patience has run out. It’s been a shit show from day one and I honestly don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Google's not infallible either. I was looking at a map and noticed that it labelled a restaurant called OPH in Chanhassen, MN. The Original Pancake House is one of my favorite restaurants and is sometimes abbreviated OPH, so I was intrigued. Going to the street view you can see that it's a purely residential area with a park and a pool and no restaurant in sight. Try it for yourself.
Back out of Street View and you'll see I've landed at Prairie Center Dr, Eden Prairie, MN. Is this right?
What's interesting is that if I type "oph chanha" Maps autocompletes "OPH Summerfield Drive, Chanhassen, MN, USA" but then if I hit Enter, it thinks for a fraction of a second then just stops dead. If I hit Enter again it comes up with no results. Interesting glitch!
I did the autocomplete test in incognito to get non-cookie/history-polluted results.
It seems they wanted to be Google Maps but failed. You raise a very interesting point with OpenStreetMap - just like WebKit, Apple could just have put some of their billions into boosting that effort, I agree that this would have been way more productive, especially given how engaged smartphone users are with their maps.
Not sure what you are saying with the comparison to Webkit. As Webkit only became what it is because someone actually took Apple to task over the Khtml (K as in KDE, used to power their Konqueror browser) engine license.
And even then the first response from Apple was a plain source dump with zero documentation on the changes they have made, that made it basically impossible to roll the changes back into Khtml.
Would not surprise me that this was one of the reasons Apple went to work purging GPL licensed code from their offerings.
I was using Google Maps in Amsterdam a few months ago and tried to go to a restaurant. Google Maps led me into a tunnel and in the middle was it was happy to announce I reached my destination. It happened to be that this restaurant was located on an island above the tunnel and I actually drove right under it. I have no experience with Apple Maps though.
These building footprints, complete with height detail, are algorithmically created by taking aerial imagery and using computer vision techniques to render the building shapes.
I could have guessed that before the punchline. And it's not that difficult to add for a company with tens of billions in cash. What are you doing, Apple? Fix your OS and Maps!
Lenses don't work that way, surely. Any image taken directly downwards will include angled elements offset at a greater angle away from the centre line. Also, how hard is it to add an extra camera or two if you're already flying over, sure double/triple the data but that must be relatively easy to handle once you have the infrastructure for image handling and such.
I switched as well, for different reasons. Some things I found that I liked about apple maps: its navigation has speed limit information and I much prefer its design. It seems less busy, and it gets out of my way. Something about google maps just felt really cramped. I know that sounds really subjective, but I enjoyed using one more than the other.
That said, google has better directions and estimates. And maybe that should trump all. It hasn’t been enough of an issue to convince me to reinstall.
It's a bit of a hack but I run Waze in the background when I'm doing navigation via Google Maps. It'll play a sound at me when I exceed the speed limit and it'll warn me about upcoming road hazards (and cops!).
Let me give the experiment more time, it’s only been a few thousand miles, but so far I’ve found it in SF Bay Area to be equally as good. And I prefer it’s design to google maps or waze.
Did you try recently or in the 2011 debut debacle era? Honestly for the longest time it was in my junk folder due to bad early experiences.
In the Midwest, Google isn't that great either. On a site I run I often have automatically-generated links to Google Maps where my software puts the business name and then the street address into a Google Maps search and half the time it fails. But if I just put the address without the business name, it brings me to the right spot.
Driving to my grandparents house until two or three years ago, Google would route you off a paved highway down an impassable two-track road only to bring you back around to the highway later.
When you're up against that kind of technology, Apple Maps doesn't seem so painful.
I gotta pinch zoom all the way in, jiggle the map around a bunch, just to see street names. It's annoying as fuck since it's the most important thing on the map when walking in a city to orientate yourself (because we all know those digital compasses are garbage).
I should really just carry a magnetic compass on my key chain again.
I really miss the classic maps interface. More streets, more relevant detail and much much faster. Classic maps that used the whole screen without the white area on the left, and the vector rendering tech would have been way better than their crappy web interface now.
> I take the train and walk a lot more than I drive.
Intersting, I have the opposite opinion precisely because I walk to most places. Building outlines give you a good idea of where you can walk–often taking the Manhattan path through a city is suboptimal, and you can cut through blocks based on what's in them. Building outlines let you know if there are alleyways that you can go through.
When can we get a flight simulator using Google Maps data? It doesn't need the fidelity of data for names of streets, places, etc. just the imagery.
If they can extrapolate building details like bay windows, then they should be able to model entire areas from enough heights and angles to represent it much better than what I've seen in flight simulators for personal use (at least last I looked).
Didn't google earth have exactly this in the early days? I can't remember exact details, but pretty sure it was an easter egg - ctrl + alt + a would launch it.
But they do have Android and all the smartphones that use Android or have Google maps installed and those smartphones also probably have GPS recivers and accelerometers.
Maybe it's naive of me, but I would assume it won't take 6 years for Apple to redo the work that Google is ahead on. For one thing, they now know a specific feature to work toward, which cuts some time out. Then, they can likely throw more cycles at this problem than Google could 6 years ago, again reducing Google's lead. Lastly, they probably have a lot of stored raw data (satellite images specifically) that Google didn't have at the start and took time to collect multiple angles over time.
I think you're confusing ideas/features with execution. Apple knew very well at the onset what to build. But they executed poorly and underestimated the amount of non-trivial human involvement in correcting mistakes and combining many layers of information into a cohesive and [mostly] robust experience.
These kinds of applications aren't Apple's strong suit, and Google is years ahead on technical abilities on the data correction and feedback front as well as custom satellite hardware and software design. Although Apple may be moving on that [1].
I was pleasantly surprised to how much attention to detail and thought goes into the cartography design on Google Maps. Just yesterday, I noticed this little gem when searching for the Channel Islands off of California: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Channel+Islands+National+P...
Try zooming in and zooming out slowly and watch what happens to the labeling of the islands since they are actually a collection.
Great article, but it has me thinking: what is holding Apple back?
My ideas:
- Apple is just a few years behind; they launched a decade later. Come back in 3 years and they'll be close to parity.
- Apple only needs Maps to be good enough to avoid PR disaster, since they need a reasonable default on iOS. On the other hand Google needs to be good enough to beat competitors since they want to make money on traffic, usage data, and the Maps API.
- Google's use of reCAPTCHA gives it a huge edge over competitors in mass image classification.
With their cash pile, they could surely expand, considering the long term returns on such expansion of computing power. Maybe Apple just dosent see the need to improve or dosent see any revenue potential with Maps.
Apple's forte is not high-caliber software engineering, or scaling huge infrastructure, as is the case at AWS/GCP. Apple's track record in recent years is pretty shoddy, and downright embarrassing in the last several months.
This Internet / Web software services weakness goes all the way back for Apple. Jobs was constantly frustrated at how mediocre Apple's results were in that area (in my opinion I don't think he was very good at cultivating that area in terms of his expertise or skill).
It's extremely difficult for a company to be good at many things. I'd be skeptical there's anything Apple can ever do to be good at their hardware object core (hardware + OS) and Internet services. iTunes has sucked for years, they either don't care or can't do anything about it. How did Spotify take the lead in streaming services? Why didn't they understand to acquire Netflix for streaming when it was tiny? Same fundamental reason, Apple isn't very good at Internet services.
Siri, iTunes, streaming (which is doing ok), Apple Maps, MobileMe, Ping, these are all the same problem. They mostly got the App Store right, to their credit.
For me the App Store is one of the worst apps on iOS. Just look at how many complain about its poor search results. I just skip them and use Google to search for iOS apps.
Apple really didn't get it in the Jobs days. For quite a while, Cupertino's built-in Google Maps app sent traffic to two Netscalers in California that Apple managed, no matter where your iPhone was. That was definitely not Google's idea. As you can imagine, hilarity of all kinds did ensue.
One way around that would be to start a new subsidiary that is mandated to focus on services, hire good people to run it, dont list it till its profitable and support it financially. Atleast that is one way to overcome the too big to innovate type weaknesses.
Apple had a huge head start with Siri but has been surpassed quite handily by Google and Amazon for some time now. I'm not sure we can simply rely on the passage of time for Apple to improve these large projects.
On the other hand, Google had a huge head start in developing robust voice recognition with GOOG-411. Whereas Alexa and Siri are more or less at parity, from what I've heard.
But, I own neither an Echo, nor an Android, and I'm still running iOS 6 on an iPhone 4S.
I think a big part of this, at least when compared to google, is Siri's issues with language understanding rather than converting the audio to text. Google is much better at picking up on contextual details simply because they have such a huge background in doing so for search.
My heuristic is that it's usually faster to catch-up to something that already exists than it is to invent something new. Given sufficient effort Apple should be able to asymptotically approach Google's capabilities. But considering the other two points I mentioned, it's not a given that they will.
If you worked at Apple would you want to be working on Apple Maps? I just doubt any of the core talents in Apple are interested in it at all, it's not what the company is known for.
Maybe all those smart engineers could put their heads together and figure out how to not zoom into street view when I want to view a picture on a review. And maybe return me to where I was in the review list instead of taking me back to the top level business information. What a feat of engineering that would be.
Hmm, this really does make me worried for OpenStreetMap. If the competition is so powerful and has a moat protecting it that will only grow larger, how can it ever hope to catch up? This isn't a case like Wikipedia where it entered a market that was barely there (e.g. online/software encyclopedias). Instead, you have to face off against giants with enormous resources and the money for any type of data. Amateur volunteers working on their own areas won't really be able to keep up. And it'll be even harder to recruit more workers because the competition is so entrenched/good while OSM can be subpar in some aspects. Oh, and these volunteers will instead give their time to Google because it's something they already know and use (I have a friend who does things like answer questions, take pictures of places, for points).
Niantic switched Pokémon Go and Ingress over to using OpenStreetMap as the base map last week.
That's one way OSM can compete with Google, it is available for the low price of attribution. Pokémon players have quite some interest in improving OSM.
OSM can also end up with data for things that Google doesn't find interesting. Google doesn't have the nice walking path/bike trail in a local park that I added to OSM several years ago.
That depends. The OSM licence requirements depends on what you do. If you don't produce a geo database, then there's only an attribution requirement, otherwise you have to attribute and release changes to the data you made, along with any other data that you mixed in.
> this really does make me worried for OpenStreetMap. If the competition is so powerful and has a moat protecting it that will only grow larger, how can it ever hope to catch up?
When OSM started in 2004 (before Google Maps), the only real place you could get map data was from governments. The idea of everyone walking around with GPSes to make their own map sounds like it'll never work. And yet here we are.
> This isn't a case like Wikipedia where it entered a market that was barely there (e.g. online/software encyclopedias).
The encyclopedia market did exist, for decades, before Wikipedia. I'll bet very few people are buying family encyclopedias now.
I am thankful for projects like OpenStreetMaps. If I ever switch to a libre mobile operating system it, will take little time to get OSM-based maps app there.
Main priority of giant corporations is money, no matter what. They will always support mainstream closed platforms only.
Yeah, here the buildings quickly disappear outside of dense areas. Which could be a result of prioritizing the denser areas with an automated system, but there's lots of missing buildings in the built up areas too.
I think people generally wildly underestimate the scope and impact of Ground Truth (or are entirely ignorant of it).
Back when Apple Maps launched (and probably just after GT had been publicly acknowledged), I had a chat with an Apple journalist, and basically told him that Apple had no idea what they were in for. They'd fix the obvious big public bugs (turning off of highway overpasses) easily enough, but they would remain way behind on data quality. Back then Google was spending something like a billion dollars a year for GT and Street View alone, which is a massive organization that Apple just didn't have, wasn't likely to build, and couldn't license. Add to that a huge lead in satellite imagery, custom flyover data, business data from web search, customer feedback from their incumbent maps app, and I just didn't see any way that Apple was going to come even close to Google's map quality in the next several years. Basically the only question to me was if/how quickly they'd reach "good enough" status for their users to avoid tarnishing their brand.
Story time: Back before GT was used widely, I think some street addresses were placed by just linearly interpolating them along the road. Charleston and Rengstorff are a bit weird near the Google campus, so for a while people looking for directions to the shopping center on the other side of the freeway would find themselves getting directed (embarrassingly!) to the Google Maps building, with its big red pin in front reminding them how they'd been led astray. After giving directions to these lost souls one too many times, I got annoyed enough to rant to someone about how terrible the data was. He agreed, took me over to a what I now know must have been a GT operator, got it fixed, and told me it would be live within a month. So I got to say that I'd personally served some Maps traffic, and reduced load on a low performance server as well (my QPS is pathetic).
I was surprised how the post yammered on about extracting data from street view .. when a lot of data is added by humans (Local Guides) and by business owners themselves.
I've been an apple maps user since day 0 - and other than a sometime annoying inability to FIND an address - its been remarkably reliable for me - even driving to places in the middle of nowhere - YMMV though - if you live in a different place, your luck may vary significantly.
I'm also not someone who gets lost easy either however, and learned how to navigate pre-GPS - so again, YMMV.
I wonder if they are using a technique similar to pix2pix (https://github.com/phillipi/pix2pix) under the hood to turn satellite images into structure depth maps.
The direction capabilities is what makes me use google maps more, it’s just more reliable in general and gives better routes. Sometimes Apple would give these really dumb routes. I would say ‘why would you do that?’
It's surprising to me that Apple has 3D building data from Flyover already, but doesn't use it. They have reasonably good 3D scans of cities, with textures, and it doesn't seem that much of a stretch for them to differentiate between trees, cars etc. and turn that into building shapes - even if it requires human sorting, Apple does have billions of dollars. They could end up with more detailed buildings on their 2D view than Google.
That being said, they probably simply don't care. Maps is a means to an end for Apple, and likely not itself a direct money maker. People use it because Apple has a captive audience - you can't set your default Maps app on the iPhone to anything else. I don't get the feeling anybody actually likes it, altho I do enjoy using Flyover to see those 3d scans from time to time.
Minor criticism of this great article: a side-by-side view of the images would be better for comparison and more comfortable to the user than an automatically changing gif.
> They have reasonably good 3D scans of cities, with textures, and it doesn't seem that much of a stretch for them to differentiate between trees, cars etc. and turn that into building shapes
Are they not? The area around me has somewhat decent outlines of stuff like trees that I'd assume is coming from the satellite data, since it looks too odd for a human to do manually…
> I don't get the feeling anybody actually likes it
I enjoy using it. It's well integrated with iOS (and IMHO looks prettier than Google Maps as well).
Google also has a giant lead in trails / feature names. I hike a ton and Google has been adding trails at a brisk pace. I just checked the Snoqualmie Pass area about an hour outside of Seattle and Apple Maps has almost no trails, named mountains or named lakes (even quite large ones). A few trails show up as unnamed roads. There's also no relief shading to tell where the mountains are or a terrain view for contour lines.
I've added a lot of those places manually through the "Add a missing place" in the menu. The review process either takes 2 days or stays in limbo forever. Google maps also gamified the contribution process so you can get internet points for improving their maps.
"... guides who get to level four will now get three months of free access to Google Play Music and 75 percent off rentals in the Google Play Movie store."
Yep, it's a shell of its former glory. They used to give out Google Map shirts at the end of the year if you contribute allot, as well as 1TB of free Google Drive storage for a year. You also sometimes get invited to try some map-related apps before it becomes public. Very rare though.
Just to make sure, you're aware that this information you're contributing is to the benefit of a company that has no interest in sharing the data back with you if it's not a financial win for them? Because that's the reason I don't want to contribute: I can't even export my own changes in a standard format, let alone our collective contributions or even all data.
Yep, though I use All Trails when actually on the trail, it's fantastic. I just appreciate seeing trails (and trailheads as POIs) when using Google Maps for drives.
> There's also no relief shading to tell where the mountains are or a terrain view for contour lines.
At least in my experience, this is done to keep the view uncluttered. The data is still there, and turning on Satellite view+3D shows the mountains and hills.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadWe might disagree on some points but his work is truly amazing and always interesting.
I agree with you over his previous blog and about his position at Apple Maps, great to see him doing what he does best.
It's wonderfully written too, easy to follow through his logic without having to re-read sections.
??? He writes a lot of this article like he's trying to guess from press and outside observation what Apple is doing / planning. If he was JUST working there, wouldn't he know all this? Should his 'outside observations' be considered to be him fitting outside information to what he already knows?
As a side note this gives me great confidence that Waymo will come out of the self driving car race in pole position.
Not to sound like a jerk, but I would be shocked if there were anyone working on this that was not pursuing things in this way. It just seems kind of obvious that you can't have some big hunk of metal rolling around, following some abstracted track from a map, without "looking" where it is going.
But hey, that's not a realistic danger in the city, right? Well, look up the sinkhole named "Steve" that opened up in the middle of an Oakland, CA freeway.
Then there's Highway 1, which is known for landslides. Not to mention that little incident with the Bay Bridge back in '89...
Then think of what percentage of the time they're right.
Another interesting thing to consider, should there be widespread use of autonomous vehicles is the absolutely massive deployment of digital sensors that would entail, and who would use this data and to what ends? It would basically be realtime Streetview.
As a hypothetical, what if autonomous driving is seen to depend on what many would see as invasive data collection and monitoring? Should it be permitted? That's a hypothetical, but I don't think there's an obvious answer to the question as posed.
Does it get sent back to the mothership? How is it processed? Is it discarded? Who has access?
When data is the new oil, these questions answer themselves if there is not legislation to prevent it.
Such data would be hugely attractive for commercial interests.
Hedge-funds and the like, use aerial imagery to get data like the amount of cars in parking lots at shopping areas.
With a fleet of cars with 360 degree cameras driving around, not only could the number of people on the sidewalks be counted, but it would be technically possible to identify most of them.
I don't think that we'll ever justify that massive loss of privacy is more important than massive loss of life and health; especially if the bad consequences of loss of privacy is generally hypothetical and in the future; and the bad consequences of traffic accidents are obvious and immediate.
Each time justin writes a blog post, I feel like a cartographer for a couple of minutes.
I love the attention he puts to the evolution of mapping services.
The only better thing would be the same blog as a post mortem from Google where they discuss the reasoning, design and tech behind these changes.
Typing in an address, going there by directions, verifying the building front without extra time needed for travel is truly magic.
Not only GM was generally right, the overal intertial refresh rate was smooth .. extremely surprising.
For me it's one or two announcements of the actual destination address at the end of the drive. If it's not an address I'm familiar with and not a business with a sign out front, by the time I get there I've usually forgotten the street number!
But when I arrive all I hear is "your destination is on the right."
It would be so great if the last two announcements were:
"Your destination, 123 Main Street, will be on the right in 800 feet."
"Your destination, 123 Main Street, is on the right."
To his credit, he immediately started thinking through what had gone wrong, but it was so awesome to be a witness to that moment.
"Your destination is on the right, 123 Main Street."
What was Google Maps for mobile in 2005? Those were flip phone days for me.
https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3073/2874464079_0fea1bc0c0_b.j...
https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2140/2220421483_f4a2ccea8a_b.j...
My fault of course for using that laptop, but sometimes I forget because it basically works for most other things.
I switch to Apple Maps on mobile when Google stopped letting me search for directions without signing in.
Incredible piece of technology, destroyed by real bad product decisions.
Not just for being one of the first apps to be properly dynamic and AJAX based, but also because it was possibly the first time that we had access to an entire world of satellite maps online, something previously reserved for large corporations and governments.
Lately I have even been wanting an operating system that has maps as the main UI, or a majorly core feature. With the amount that I use maps, it is an absolute pain to have to switch to it all the time.
I pin every place recommendation I find in my social circles online and tag them with who suggested them. When I'm driving I'd like to pin/note places I see without interacting with the phone. When I'm flying I wan't to know what specific features I am seeing from the air (towns, mountains, lakes). When I'm on a road trip I want to hear snippets of info about the small towns that I'm passing through or the things I see out the window. When I'm walking I want to use the camera for input and output to the map to pin and locate myself. When I'm indoors I don't want to feel lost again or ask where the restroom is.
Location has become a core part of my interaction with the world but it still feels rather basic as a 3rd party app on my phone. Or another tab on my desktop.
At least when your product is something physical you end up with twice as many outputs. When it's just data you just do the same work twice.
https://trademarks.justia.com/860/91/mapzen-86091461.html
https://mapzen.com/about/
> Mapzen is an open and accessible mapping platform...Based out of the Samsung Accelerator, we support the geo community through building tools and collaborating on open source mapping projects. We believe that a healthy mapping ecosystem is one that is diverse, sustainable, and accessible to all.
We've made much use of:
- http://www.openstreetmap.org/
- https://openaddresses.io/
And founded efforts like:
- https://transit.land
- https://whosonfirst.mapzen.com/
- https://aws.amazon.com/public-datasets/terrain/
Monocultures are dangerous too.
People differ on what to measure and how. Competition gives us an opportunity to try something new and potentially better. Especially when there isn't a network effect (e.g. phone protocols).
Also, the cost of this mapping apparently isn't especially high.
No, it's actually a feature: competition. With a single product in every category it would be impossible to have diversity of ideas being tested and competing.
It is the same with evolution.
Why? Google seems to have a gigantic advantage in data, which is highly valuable.
Why would they give up that advantage, if they spent millions, if not billions, of dollars creating it?
And what would be the incentive to create such data if there's no economic gain from it?
If the data is useful then there is an _economic_ gain, just not necessarily a profit.
If you meant "if there's no profit from it" then it was spoken like a true capitalist.
Why do anything if you're not going to be paid for it.
Why visit your mum in hospital? Why give money to the homeless for food? Why create software for others? Why teach a child a fun game? Love, altruism, interest, expediency, fun, ... and a million other reasons besides.
Would you invest your retirement savings into a company that plans to return no profit by mapping the world and releasing the data for free?
I thought so.
I've worked on OSM, AFAIK I've got nothing back from having done so other than learning a little about maps.
Your position is flawed, because you're focussing on a single element of a social system. If I invest in mapping, it doesn't remove resources, it improves them for everyone. Without the waste of resources of solely profit-driven activity then we have ample resources to meet basic needs and develop technologically too.
No, I don't yet know how such a system can work. I've been working on it ... transition is the biggest problem and the one I've been addressing. At some point I hope it will benefit us all as a species - probably at a financial loss to me and many others.
We're not talking about a bunch of people pitching in some time as they feel about doing it, we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars (probably more) spent on this.
But, as you wouldn't invest your retirement funds in such a company, why would you expect others to do so?
We, humans, currently spend the resources on those things through the medium of fiat currency. Remove the necessity for profit, the need to pay a lot of people in that system incredibly more than they require - take a couple of dozen 8-figure mansions, a few 9-figure yachts, several hundred 6-figure cars, gold-plated taps, diamond-encrusted tiaras, etc., etc., and the resources targeted at the problem of producing maps go much further. And there's no reason not to have a competitive element, you don't need profit to create competition.
It's not spending people's retirement, it's spending the same resources we spend now, just not mediated in the same manner and without the waste of 40% spend on advertising (plucked that number out my ass but a few years ago pharma was spending more on advertising than on R&D) and without allowing controlling elements to steal all the output for personal gain.
So, I'd like to spend the equivalent resources we do now, but with saving on profit, over-paying wages, and de-duplication of effort. That gives much more resources applied to the actual task without touching pensions (which of course I'd like to see have the same effect).
The problem, is that moving to such an economic system requires the most greedy, most powerful, to be usurped. Humans are greedy (myself included), that leads us to waste so, so, much of our resources.
Why do you think a system where people choose the collective good (having all their needs met) - "volunteering" - rather than personal financial gain can't produce satellites, or any other good/technology we now produce?
No. You're missing the point:
> And there's no reason not to have a competitive element, you don't need profit to create competition.
This is where you're getting things wrong. We need competition to advance. Resources are limited and we compete for those resources. Competition is a resource-allocation system.
Sure, you can advocate for a centrally-planned pipe dream as much as you want, it doesn't work. It has been tried many times before, to horrendous results every single time.
> Why do you think a system where people choose the collective good (having all their needs met) - "volunteering" - rather than personal financial gain can't produce satellites, or any other good/technology we now produce?
For the same reason that unicorns can't fly: they can't even exist.
If you had a single company, you wouldn't have 10 teams doing the exact same job. The competition here isn't fruitful because so much of the work is shared. Competition is more effective when there is a diversity of approaches.
Think about how mapping was done before Google. Competition is exactly why we have Google Maps, and why Google Maps is continuously improving, instead of just sitting on its advantage.
Not only competition here has been extremely fruitful, it has made maps freely available to consumers.
Do you remember how much the TomTom app used to cost?
I'm glad that Nvidia and AMD compete to build better graphics chips, I'm also very glad they both work with a shared, cooperative standard (PCI-E) so I can plug them into my computer. They've chosen to compete on some areas and cooperate in others.
The parents are suggesting, hey, wouldn't it be nice if _everyone_ contributed data to OSM, and then competed on providing the best interface on top of that, rather than constructing data moats. Is it realistic that Google would do this? Of course not. But if 10 companies are all constructing their own data completely independently, that's an awful lot of duplicated work that could be avoided.
Data is the interesting part. And it needs more investment. Data is the valuable part. UX has very little relevance here.
Companies are competing on what matters and what gives them a competitive edge. Map UX doesn't. Map data does.
And who would do that?
Coke and Pepsi have been around for a long time, despite sharing the same set of ingredients that any other soda maker can use. Their value comes from marketing and distribution systems.
By stating "collaborate on X so that we can focus or compete on Y" merely adds one more turtle to to the the stack. You need to take a step back and ask these sorts of questions:
Does competition solve any problems that cooperation does not, or solve them better?
Do problems arise in competition that would not under cooperation?
Is there a 3rd alternative?
What about competition that pursues what's best for everyone, even if it is worse for the individual company pursuing it? (arguably not possible when corporate officers have a fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interest of the company, which presents a conflict)
Railroads should compete on service, quality and price. They should not compete by laying down parallel tracks side by side.
Some things should be shared in common and competitive services built on top.
Only when the existence of one incumbent inhibits the entrance of new ones, like physical infrastructure and natural monopolies.
As you can see, there is an abundance of mapping services. So yeah, competition is working great here.
Same as me.
In situations where most of the cost to set up a business is upfront, the marginal cost is very low and you can't "move" the immobilized capital after (like power lines, train lines, water main, fiber optic networks), there is a massive advantage to the first entrant (the "incumbent").
In these cases, there are massive barriers for new entrants: any new entrant would have to make an immense investment with zero chance of making it back, as the incumbent could just retaliate by lowering prices and driving the entrant out of business.
This situation means that there is little chance that competition will happen, so it is the best interest of society to mandate the operation of the infrastructure from the service. That's what happens with local-loop unbundling, or when the ownership and operation of the rail infrastructure must be separate from the ownership and operation of train lines and services.
That is not the case with mapping the world: anyone can do it, and having an incumbent doesn't block new entrants. There were already many incumbents when Google entered the mapping business, and there's still plenty of competition.
Therefore, there is no reason to mandate separation.
So no, it isn't "100% just your opinion".
But I appreciate the Lebowski reference :)
If it weren't for the need to compete, would Google have spent billions on innovations like Street View, Satellite imagery, Google Earth, etc. Or would they have just said, "MapQuest has won the internet maps game, let's just let MapQuest do their own thing. No use in doing the same work twice,"
I disagree with the competition is always good. There are many cases where you are duplicating work. The best standard rarely wins (PCI vs MCA .. MCA was superior in many ways technologically .. was even hot pluggable, but PCI had better licensing).
We get into a lot of repetition and the 'best' product rarely wins. It's more about marketing your product in a way people desire it. Example: Beats Audio Headphones.
When specific about the type of data there is a lot less competition than you might expect. And for commercial companies it makes sense to make as much money as possible front that.
I worked for a couple of years in a valley with only 2 access points.
Quite often, when it is time to go back home, the trafic would be jammed.
I activated Google Now (or at least I think it was already called that way ?) and without fail it would warn me that there is no point in leaving the building right now since everything was jammed.
The same info was visible on maps.
I'm not trying to randomly snipe at Apple here, I just know very little about Apple Maps beyond the bad press its gotten and Apple's general software product competency weaknesses.
EDIT: Thanks for the responses, that's all pretty much the kind of thing I was wondering about
But even with all of these reasons, Google's data and search capabilities are so much better than Apple's that they make Apple Maps feel unusable by comparison.
Issues:
- Search results are terrible compared to Google's.
- While the UI is generally smoother, it lags behind (i.e. It shows a turn a good bit after I do). This is especially frustrating when driving through small city blocks and trying to be in the correct lane for the next turn.
- Lane guidance was finally added, but no way to see ahead like in gmaps.
- Day/night mode is very fussy. When I'm driving through the Bay Bridge at night it constantly flips back and forth between day/night due to the overhead lights.
- It is pretty frustrating that the line ahead of me is constantly wobbling around instead of matching the curve/line ahead of me. It feels disorienting and makes it difficult to see if there's an upcoming left/right ahead. Google generally does a good job trying to visually match what you're seeing. https://imgur.com/a/t3Sxm
- If I check traffic when I wake up, then go through my morning routine, then check it again, there's a 90% chance it'll crash on startup.
- No way to add a stop
- No street view
and so on...
You can add a stop, but it's limited to gas stations, coffee shops and restaurants. Why? I don't know.
It's the same (and most recent) version of all these browsers as my other Mac, where it works fine. How does one debug this? I've tried googling (ha) for every combination of words I can imagine. Google's tech support seems basically nonexistent, for their free services.
Or I can just open Maps.app, and it always works. The data isn't as good but it's not terrible, and at least the basics work fine. I'm not a heavy maps user so that's good enough for me.
1. Google’s Material UI is a total dumpster fire and I use it only as a last resort.
2. Apple Maps integrates much better with everything else I’m using, so the experience is smoother (e.g., looking up an address on my laptop and then sending directions to my phone).
I keep Google Maps around as a backup, mostly for places of interest way out in the boonies, like hiking trailheads.
But I always come back to Material's "Up" button when asked for an example: https://material.io/guidelines/patterns/navigation.html#navi...
Google maps, however, knows where everything is, everywhere. Also, you can download offline maps and get navigation in the middle of nowhere.
I switch to Google when traffic is really bad, as I trust its timing estimates more.
"Google is creating data out of data ... It makes you wonder how long back Google was planning all of this—and what it’s planning next"
My guess is that they weren't planning it. Somebody decided to use their 20% time to learn TensorFlow and process the Street View imagery for fun, and that side project got promoted into Maps.
When I downloaded 10 years of church notice sheets, I was trying to get the lyrics of the songs in Chinese. I later realised that I could also find the most common song names, and then focus my Chinese-learning on those songs. Big data is all about gathering more data than you know what to do with, and figuring it all out as you go.
The data you see in Google Maps came and probably still comes from a pipeline of pipelines that rebuild the whole planet on a regular schedule. Since we're talking about all of Earth, random stuff here and there could cause hiccups and delays. Information comes from all sorts of sources, including custom HW (streetview camera, etc.), flying their own planes, owning a satellite company for a few years, and so on.
In one shape or another, it all predates Tensorflow by years.
According to Apple maps, the doctor's office was literally in the middle of a field. I missed it the first time around (drove past it for a few miles, following my GPSs instructions) and then soon realized that I was already going through residential areas.
Never again, Apple. For context, this was 3 months ago. This doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve. My guess is that Apple just gave up.
Maps are one area where Apple has a "meh, good enough" attitude, but Google really seems to want to really bring the next level of quality.
A few months ago, they introduced 3D buildings, and Earth shows up-to-date satellite imagery now, but still didn’t update the satellite imagery used in the Maps app.
Worse yet are maps and transit – roads and sometimes entire districts missing, data from somewhere between 2005 and 2009, and no transit data at all.
Every other map service has it all. Apple, Here, Bing, OSM, everything. Google doesn’t.
And yet people here continue using Google Maps, because "it’s the default", and Google Now can only give you estimates from Google Maps.
That shows just how powerful the advantage of a default app is, and how at this point, Google Maps is entirely without competition just because it is the default.
Not even when Google Maps sucks do people switch away – often because many don’t even know there are alternatives.
(And btw, this issue isn’t just like that in one German city, Google Maps is here like that in many places).
Google does have the better product, but for the most part I can see Apple Maps being at least “good enough” for my use, much the same way that Safari, for me at least, is “good enough” compared to Chrome. Unfortunately, anecdotes of Apple Maps underperforming are all too common, and I think Apple needs to keep investing (and probably a lot) if they intend to win users over.
Would love to see a citation for that. Wouldn't Google want to boost maps usage on iOS?
I didn’t follow all the links, but apparently this was referenced in a court case.
Uhh, it 100% is. The fact that I don't use Google Maps and use Apple Maps instead means that it's in direct competition.
I'm sure Apple would love it if you used Maps so much that it created ecosystem locking, but I doubt Apple is too upset that you downloaded Google Maps on your iPhone.
These limitations are, of course, entirely of Apple's creation.
In the end I can understand the limitations on the lock screen because it can be tricky to figure out the right way to give third-party apps special permissions like that. This is not some kind of tacked-on limitation that Apple added, but instead it's something that didn't exist on iOS until Apple added it. Remember that Google Maps, at the time, didn't give turn by turn directions at all never mind on the lock screen. Given how cautious Apple has been with the iOS permissions model (compared to Android, for sure) this shouldn't be even slightly surprising.
The fact that you can't make Google Maps the default handler is stupid, though.
Interestingly enough, I did some exploring into how Apple was doing this and it seems like there's already an (internal) "API" for bundles of code that work on the home screen and lock screen. Currently it's taken advantage of by apps like Assistant (Siri), ChatKit (I assume this is Quick Reply notifications?), Wallet (which shows up on the lock screen), and the Wi-Fi picker in addition to Maps. Check out /System/Library/SpringBoardPlugins if you're curious.
apple has hundreds of billions in the bank, so they could easily fix the problem if they wanted to. but they (mistakenly, imho) don't see it as core to their business so it limps along like it does.
With Google Maps I feel I'd have greater confidence for its accuracy, but placing complete confidence in any maps app would be a mistake.
Going to the Golden Gate Recreation Area, Google Maps sent me to a trailhead parking lot instead of the visitor's center. And for a small business near the Bay Model, GM directions stopped about half a mile away, and the map pin was on top of the Bay Model building.
here in Texas, different story. Although Google Maps isn't always that great with the parallel service roads that we have all over the place.
How Apple Maps got that wrong, I honestly don’t know. Where did the data come from, and why is it that incorrect?
I reported it, and it’s since been removed, but I can’t do that for everything in my town, and there’s so much missing; I can’t report that, or edit the map like you can on OpenStreetMap.
Honestly, why does Apple Maps exist? Either it needs to be like Google Maps (and just work), or be like OpenStreetMap and let Apple fans edit the map and get more involved.
I gave them a lot of patience and understanding years ago (mapping the world is hardly an easy task), but my patience has run out. It’s been a shit show from day one and I honestly don’t see that changing anytime soon.
https://www.google.com.au/maps/@44.8508646,-93.4259796,3a,15...
Back out of Street View and you'll see I've landed at Prairie Center Dr, Eden Prairie, MN. Is this right?
What's interesting is that if I type "oph chanha" Maps autocompletes "OPH Summerfield Drive, Chanhassen, MN, USA" but then if I hit Enter, it thinks for a fraction of a second then just stops dead. If I hit Enter again it comes up with no results. Interesting glitch!
I did the autocomplete test in incognito to get non-cookie/history-polluted results.
And even then the first response from Apple was a plain source dump with zero documentation on the changes they have made, that made it basically impossible to roll the changes back into Khtml.
Would not surprise me that this was one of the reasons Apple went to work purging GPL licensed code from their offerings.
Amsterdam is a very interesting case. From my own personal experience it's very easy to get lost there. There's even a coffee shop with that name!
Apple under Tim Cook isn't interested in hard problems. But hey, look at their amazing animated poop icon!
I could have guessed that before the punchline. And it's not that difficult to add for a company with tens of billions in cash. What are you doing, Apple? Fix your OS and Maps!
Thats surprisingly hard to buy from imagery providers, because most of them only want to point their cameras directly downwards.
Could drones be used here ? It looks like it would be a good way to refresh this data often on the cheap.
(drone is the loosest sense, a balloon would do the trick)
https://blog.google/topics/inside-google/google-earths-incre...
Too bad it's a video. Fast forward about 2 minutes.
Or: https://youtu.be/suo_aUTUpps?t=121
Fly plane. Zig zag. 5 cameras, then photogrammetry. StreetView, from planes.
Building outlines are not much of a moat for me.
That said, google has better directions and estimates. And maybe that should trump all. It hasn’t been enough of an issue to convince me to reinstall.
In all seriousness, I've found Apple Maps search to be absolutely horrendous, either missing places or having them in the wrong spot.
Did you try recently or in the 2011 debut debacle era? Honestly for the longest time it was in my junk folder due to bad early experiences.
Driving to my grandparents house until two or three years ago, Google would route you off a paved highway down an impassable two-track road only to bring you back around to the highway later.
When you're up against that kind of technology, Apple Maps doesn't seem so painful.
I take the train and walk a lot more than I drive. I need street names, and GMaps have made them harder and harder to see for years:
https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps/
I gotta pinch zoom all the way in, jiggle the map around a bunch, just to see street names. It's annoying as fuck since it's the most important thing on the map when walking in a city to orientate yourself (because we all know those digital compasses are garbage).
I should really just carry a magnetic compass on my key chain again.
I really miss the classic maps interface. More streets, more relevant detail and much much faster. Classic maps that used the whole screen without the white area on the left, and the vector rendering tech would have been way better than their crappy web interface now.
> I take the train and walk a lot more than I drive.
Intersting, I have the opposite opinion precisely because I walk to most places. Building outlines give you a good idea of where you can walk–often taking the Manhattan path through a city is suboptimal, and you can cut through blocks based on what's in them. Building outlines let you know if there are alleyways that you can go through.
If they can extrapolate building details like bay windows, then they should be able to model entire areas from enough heights and angles to represent it much better than what I've seen in flight simulators for personal use (at least last I looked).
These kinds of applications aren't Apple's strong suit, and Google is years ahead on technical abilities on the data correction and feedback front as well as custom satellite hardware and software design. Although Apple may be moving on that [1].
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/21/apple-satellite-hardware-proj...
Try zooming in and zooming out slowly and watch what happens to the labeling of the islands since they are actually a collection.
My ideas:
- Apple is just a few years behind; they launched a decade later. Come back in 3 years and they'll be close to parity.
- Apple only needs Maps to be good enough to avoid PR disaster, since they need a reasonable default on iOS. On the other hand Google needs to be good enough to beat competitors since they want to make money on traffic, usage data, and the Maps API.
- Google's use of reCAPTCHA gives it a huge edge over competitors in mass image classification.
Apple lacks the raw computing capacity to be able to pull this off, even if they had the algorithms and data already.
http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300080062/cloud-makes-for-stra...
It's extremely difficult for a company to be good at many things. I'd be skeptical there's anything Apple can ever do to be good at their hardware object core (hardware + OS) and Internet services. iTunes has sucked for years, they either don't care or can't do anything about it. How did Spotify take the lead in streaming services? Why didn't they understand to acquire Netflix for streaming when it was tiny? Same fundamental reason, Apple isn't very good at Internet services.
Siri, iTunes, streaming (which is doing ok), Apple Maps, MobileMe, Ping, these are all the same problem. They mostly got the App Store right, to their credit.
But, I own neither an Echo, nor an Android, and I'm still running iOS 6 on an iPhone 4S.
So you expect Google to stand around for 3 or more years while Apple comes close to parity with Google today?
If you worked at Apple would you want to be working on Apple Maps? I just doubt any of the core talents in Apple are interested in it at all, it's not what the company is known for.
That's one way OSM can compete with Google, it is available for the low price of attribution. Pokémon players have quite some interest in improving OSM.
OSM can also end up with data for things that Google doesn't find interesting. Google doesn't have the nice walking path/bike trail in a local park that I added to OSM several years ago.
That depends. The OSM licence requirements depends on what you do. If you don't produce a geo database, then there's only an attribution requirement, otherwise you have to attribute and release changes to the data you made, along with any other data that you mixed in.
It's like BSD for some uses, and GPL for others.
When OSM started in 2004 (before Google Maps), the only real place you could get map data was from governments. The idea of everyone walking around with GPSes to make their own map sounds like it'll never work. And yet here we are.
> This isn't a case like Wikipedia where it entered a market that was barely there (e.g. online/software encyclopedias).
The encyclopedia market did exist, for decades, before Wikipedia. I'll bet very few people are buying family encyclopedias now.
Main priority of giant corporations is money, no matter what. They will always support mainstream closed platforms only.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-maps-ground-truth/ [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-g...
Back when Apple Maps launched (and probably just after GT had been publicly acknowledged), I had a chat with an Apple journalist, and basically told him that Apple had no idea what they were in for. They'd fix the obvious big public bugs (turning off of highway overpasses) easily enough, but they would remain way behind on data quality. Back then Google was spending something like a billion dollars a year for GT and Street View alone, which is a massive organization that Apple just didn't have, wasn't likely to build, and couldn't license. Add to that a huge lead in satellite imagery, custom flyover data, business data from web search, customer feedback from their incumbent maps app, and I just didn't see any way that Apple was going to come even close to Google's map quality in the next several years. Basically the only question to me was if/how quickly they'd reach "good enough" status for their users to avoid tarnishing their brand.
Story time: Back before GT was used widely, I think some street addresses were placed by just linearly interpolating them along the road. Charleston and Rengstorff are a bit weird near the Google campus, so for a while people looking for directions to the shopping center on the other side of the freeway would find themselves getting directed (embarrassingly!) to the Google Maps building, with its big red pin in front reminding them how they'd been led astray. After giving directions to these lost souls one too many times, I got annoyed enough to rant to someone about how terrible the data was. He agreed, took me over to a what I now know must have been a GT operator, got it fixed, and told me it would be live within a month. So I got to say that I'd personally served some Maps traffic, and reduced load on a low performance server as well (my QPS is pathetic).
I'm also not someone who gets lost easy either however, and learned how to navigate pre-GPS - so again, YMMV.
That being said, they probably simply don't care. Maps is a means to an end for Apple, and likely not itself a direct money maker. People use it because Apple has a captive audience - you can't set your default Maps app on the iPhone to anything else. I don't get the feeling anybody actually likes it, altho I do enjoy using Flyover to see those 3d scans from time to time.
Minor criticism of this great article: a side-by-side view of the images would be better for comparison and more comfortable to the user than an automatically changing gif.
Are they not? The area around me has somewhat decent outlines of stuff like trees that I'd assume is coming from the satellite data, since it looks too odd for a human to do manually…
> I don't get the feeling anybody actually likes it
I enjoy using it. It's well integrated with iOS (and IMHO looks prettier than Google Maps as well).
"... guides who get to level four will now get three months of free access to Google Play Music and 75 percent off rentals in the Google Play Movie store."
Not to mention, I find seeing Googles walking tracks kinda hard, especially if you're new to an area and want to see what tracks are around.
At least in my experience, this is done to keep the view uncluttered. The data is still there, and turning on Satellite view+3D shows the mountains and hills.