I live in Canada and an Apple Street Maps car passed me sometime in spring/summer of 2019. I suspect Canada will get a similar update in 2020 or early 2021.
Apple Maps has come a long way since its disastrous initial release. For about a year now, I have rarely used Google Maps. I typically find Apple Map's routing to be just as effective, even for avoiding traffic, accidents, etc.
Yup I switched about a year ago because I liked the CarPlay interface the best out of [Apple Maps, Google Maps, Waze, Subaru Built In Maps]. And the privacy over Google Maps is a huge bonus.
I hear Apple is pretty responsive about correcting reported errors. There's error reporting inside the app that includes a spot to attach a photo. Of course, this can be problematic when driving and I much prefer Waze's error reporting.
You have to do it after, or simply stop the navigation, but once you do, if you select the “Report an Issue” option from the Info menu you can pick from your recent trips.
Once you do so, you can select the wrong turn/other problem from the list of steps and describe the problem.
My favourite feature on iPhone is it telling me where my car is parked. Sometimes I go to a meetup at a local university, which is also a rats nest of roads and alleyways, and this has saved my hide multiple times
They finally updated buildings in New Orleans that had been demolished in the 90s well before Katrina but are still giving a dangerous routing from the west bank of the river to downtown that you will get ticketed for if police will see you do it. The alternate ramp has been complete since 1992.
Google maps near me is riddled with advertisements now. Promoted pins or whatever they call it. Of course, it’s for stores that I won’t ever have a need to visit.
On my device I see a tab for ride hailing services, which is showing me choices for Uber and Lyft. I like it a lot, since I'm often choosing between walking, public transit, and Uber/Lyft. It makes it really easy to compare options.
As another piece of anecdata, I actually _do_ appreciate this tab. In the states it brings up Uber and Lyft for me, and traveling through JP I would also get Didi. Was nice to see what the price difference would be compared to public transit options.
The final straw that got me to ditch android was Google sending me push notifications asking me to review places I've been to, via maps.
If you want reviews, pay secret shoppers. And if you want me to use your app, don't make it painfully obvious you're spying on exactly where I go and when to do what.
I think it was more a way to crowdsource reviews and recommendation engine. It's certainly worth questioning the use of "unpaid labor" to improve a service, but I don't know if I'd call it "spying".
Use of the service essentially boils down to "I tell it where I am/where I want to go. It tells me how best to get there/how to find the thing I want to find."
I'm not sure how you would do that if you didn't share your location and destination/search terms with it.
But yeah, I disabled that thing too. Not because I considered a request for reviews a terrible overreach, but because it wasn't just in the Maps app, but rather a notification. I disable notifications on most non-messaging apps because they're annoying and naggy.
The issue for me is that it would ask me to review places I didn't ask for directions to. It would notice I had gone through a drive through and ask me to review the restaurant. It would ask me to review a furniture store I walked past on my way to work.
I don't want an app passively collecting data on me while I'm not using it.
I felt it was significantly more creepy when I received "How is <tourist attraction>?" messages at home. I can see the building from my window, but I didn't like being told.
I've had the location history disabled since it was possible to disable it, but I've since disabled all the notifications.
My favorite feature of Google maps is asking how i rate the directions before I get there. You know, right at the last mile while you're still trying to get where you're going.
I had google assistant turned off but every now and then when using maps my phone would say out loud something like "Sorry I don't know how to help with <thing_we_just_said>".
I couldn't find an easy way to turn it off in the app. All directions online lead to options that were already off. So like other users I had to restrict microphone access to google services entirely.
It's a super tough problem. Even Google Maps messages you that it's a feature in progress (paraphrasing of course), and they've had years of a head start on this.
You know that got me thinking, biking rules vary far more than for cars.
Depending on your location, pedestrian traffic, streets, street traffic, etc. It might be best for you to be on the sidewalk. Or maybe you should instead be on the road since the road is only 25mph and there's pedestrians on the sidewalk. Maybe there's a bike lane, maybe there isn't. Maybe a town has a law saying you HAVE to bike on the road.
Are you allowed to cut through parking lots? Is it a dirt road? Can everyone's bikes handle dirt roads? What if it just rained, cars can still cross a wet dirt road, but I'd rather take a different route if possible on a bike.
That's not including the terrain challenges (which google seems to incorporate). I'd far rather take a route that takes an extra 5 minutes and is basically level vs a route that saves time but requires you to go down and uphill. Heck even wind conditions change can change the "optimal route" in some cases.
I think you could release a simplified version of biking directions that isn't perfect, but better than nothing:
- For a limited number of cities, determine which streets the city lists as having separated bike lanes, painted bike lanes, or city-designated "bike friendly" streets. Mark them on the map appropriately in a different map overlay (or on the transit overlay)
- Bicycle directions prioritize those streets.
It's not perfect, but this would be enough for me to use the app.
Painted bike lanes are really unreliable, but otherwise that sounds like a great idea.
Most of the painted bike lanes I see in suburban Washington are painted in some of the least safe bike routes. There's a ton of bike lanes that are just painted along major thoroughfares with actual top speeds of 40 or 45 miles per hour.
They should really do it by speed limit and presence of features that obstruct car traffic. Streets that are a pain in the ass to drive on are the best streets to bike on.
Even some of the Bike Routes in Seattle are on roads that I wouldn't feel safe biking on because traffic typically clocks at 10 or 15 MPH higher than the speed limit around the curves on the route.
Well, I'm quite happy with Openstreetmap's directions for biking (I mostly use OSMand, but there are other apps/routers).
They have elevation, private/public roads, road surface, bike lanes, etc, and routers can take it into account.
Of course, that doesn't really take into account varying laws, but that might be reflected in the maps themselves (private/public places, bikes allowed/disallowed, etc).
They use the designations “town” and “city” as a way of ranking places in terms of importance.
Here in the UK that designation is almost arbitrary.
There are several large towns with greater population and navigational importance than surrounding smaller cities.
All the commercial map providers, including Apple Maps, grok that. Only opensteetmap seems still rigidly to the town < city thing. Would be much better if they could use population instead.
OSM does record population, and many sites that use OSM data parse that information. I think you're overstating the importance of the demo stylesheet on openstreetmap.org, which really isn't significant: OSM is all about recording factual map data and making it freely available.
Not sure if stylwsheet has a different meaning in the context of OSM but it is what is shown when you zoom out that I’m objecting to.
If the OSM project is just about data then it’s doing a great job.
If it’s about a usable navigation experience too then it’s failing because in the UK it doesn’t take local politics into account when deciding what to display.
I have no problem with ceremonial cities being marked as such.
What I have a big problem with is that major towns, by both population and local importance, are left off the map until you zoom to a low level.
I find this annoying enough that I actively avoid OSM based sites because it. It makes using OSM difficult to see major towns in relation other major cities.
Meanwhile there’ll be a tiny ceremonial city with a huge label over it.
> Maybe a town has a law saying you HAVE to bike on the road.
I think that's usually the case.
This page [1] says:
> The law in most areas of the country require bicycles to follow the same rules of the road as other motor vehicles. In essence, riding your bike down the sidewalk is the same as if you hopped the curb and started rolling it in your car.
Not always though, for example here in Michigan [0]. At least around here some of the streets are NOT the kind you want to ride your bike on, and there's only a few pedestrians on the sidewalk (so it's not a big deal even if you stopped and walked your bike around them).
> Bicycles may be ridden upon a sidewalk, but cyclists must yield the right-of-way to pedestrians and are required to give an audible signal before overtaking and passing a pedestrian.
And to make it even more complicated:
> Further, official traffic control devices or local ordinances may restrict bicycles on sidewalks in some areas.
Doesn't seem that different. Basically, you're expected to be on the road and obey road rules, but you're allowed on the side walk if the local ordinance doesn't ban it and you give right-of-way and a wide berth to pedestrians.
i.e. riding on the sidewalk is more of an exception, and is typically allowed for kids.
This is pretty common, I believe. I looked up my local (Cambridge MA) laws and they say the same thing (and have a list of the sidewalks you can't bike on), and New York state looks the same.
In the dot.ny.gov FAQs, they explicitly say that sidewalk riding is legal unless posted, but is specifically intended more for young children.
> Depending on your location, pedestrian traffic, streets, street traffic, etc. It might be best for you to be on the sidewalk. … Maybe a town has a law saying you HAVE to bike on the road.
Depending on location indeed. The majority of US states still make it blanket illegal to bicycle on a sidewalk, codified into early highway laws. (It's also probable the last time those laws were effectively enforced was somewhere in the middle of the 20th Century.) There are states where it is illegal, but individual counties or cities (or strange in-betweens like townships) override their state laws and allow it. I don't know of any examples of the opposite where a state allows it, but individual towns forbid it, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I made a comment to a sibling with an example from Michigan.
I won't copy paste the whole comment but Michigan allows biking on sidewalks but you have to yield to pedestrians. But individual towns may add their own restrictions.
There are of course plenty of bike routing sites online, generally based on OpenStreetMap source data.
I run cycle.travel (https://cycle.travel/map) which offers super-fast bike directions in Europe, North America and Australia/NZ. It has a number of unique features under the hood that I think lift the quality of its routes above other similar sites (but then I would say that). Always happy to entertain offers if Apple want to buy me...
I suspect it may be california-centrism. Bikes are a vital mode in Europe and many other parts of the road. In california car is king, bikes are either recreational or for hardcore commutes.
You can see similar assumptions in how Siri is designed. (“Users only speak one language at a time”) or the effectiveness of multilanguage support in autocorrect. Most people outside north america use their own language + english fairly frequently. At least those in apple’s customer demographic.
Sure, there’s plenty of California-centrism, but from where I’m sitting, a multilingual Siri sounds like a massive technical challenge. I also remember how long it took Google to roll out bike directions, and just how awful it was at first, when it was rolling out.
Bicycle directions are more challenging than directions for cars, public transit, and walking. I’m just speaking from my own personal experience, here. In every city I’ve lived in, I’ve had to test out different bicycle commuting routes until I found one which I liked. Walking and driving I will just take the fastest route and be done with it. Everyone has different preferences for bicycling for how much elevation climb they can handle, how much traffic they tolerate, etc.
Google Maps' icon is also a location pin, while Apple Maps' is a highway. Google also has 21% of its local staff bike to work [1]. Apple's campus is so far that you can't realistically live in SF proper, you mostly have to drive. These kind of different motivations and cultures bleed through to their products.
Because unlike Google, Apple is a California and especially Cupertino centric company so most of their employees have probably never used mapping outside the confines of their car. Transit and walking directions are decent on Apple Maps but still leaps and bounds behind Google Maps. Just shows how forcing all your employees to live and work in the same place is incredibly limiting
I want to use Apple Maps more, but they still dont offer cycling directions. I used to use Apple Maps exclusively until I needed cycling directions because of the better lock screen integration and otherwise acceptable results, but I am still waiting...
Congrats to the teams who did this! It’s been a long time coming.. and a lot of people said along the way that Apple should just give up it was too far behind. Perseverance (and a lot of resources) can go a long way!
It reminds me of some advice given to me by a heavily successful industrialist friend — never dismiss your competition, for the world is not static.
"Is it Apple Maps bad?" --Gavin Belson, Silicon Valley
They had no place to go but up. That first version was absolutely embarrassing. I'm honestly surprised they were allowed to make it this far. To this day, I still do not use Apple Maps. As much as they try to get me to use it with all of the iOS embedding they've done, I still won't use it.
Anecdotally Apple Maps is still really bad. I have tried using it to drive and walk around major cities in the last two years and it just completely misrepresents where some roads are, it doesn't catch up with construction, etc. etc.
Yes, which means that the person you are responding may have had new data already from the old rollout. Not sure what are you trying to say from this comment.
I interpreted "Doesn't necessarily mean EVERYONE is getting new data TODAY" to mean that they don't have new data at all. My original comment was a reference to the "the last two years" of the GP, suggesting that their experience will be different now than 2 years ago. Perhaps in the last year it was already different and still not good enough, or perhaps it wasn't different yet and now it will be so the two year old data isn't sufficient to judge anymore. Only fjp can say.
I meant this to imply that my experience likely did not include the new data or experience or whatever they updated.
I’m always cheering for a really good G Maps alternative and will give Apple Maps another shot
Anecdotally I have been using it for the last 7 years and it's been perfectly fine around multiple US states and dozens of cities. The only glitch I had was driving out of the Dallas airport, but Google Maps had the exact same glitch.
Don't worry, everyone has problems driving out of DFW airport with or without a maps app. From it's left exits to the merging lanes from cloverleaf ramps/exits, it is amazing there are not more accidents than there are.
I've tried it several times after various upgrades, but just never has won me over. There's multiple competing products. This particular one has always been behind in usability. There's just always been something that wasn't up to snuff, and I stop using it. I have better things to do than suffer with less usable software.
In the old days of Macromedia Freehand and Adobe Illustrator, each version would add features and updates that would make it slightly better than the other. I would use it until the other came out with their new version. It was a constant ping pong/leapfrog of competing products trying to win until Adobe ultimately won outright. In my testing, not once has Apple Maps leapfrogged to be the leading app.
This update may make me switch from Google Maps. The UI in Google Maps has always been confusing and cluttered. There's a search bar, then quick search buttons underneath, then the layers button, "Explore nearby", explore, commute, "For you", and then finally the hamburger menu.
Apple Maps is a lot cleaner but the only thing missing was the quality of the actual maps. Hopefully that has changed now.
There's also the ability to collaborate with people who don't have an iOS device. If someone creates a Collection in Apple Maps I just don't get to participate. If someone creates a shared list in Google Maps I can see it on my phone, a web browser, someone with an iPhone...
Google doesn't give your map collections to advertisers.
It's true that Google gets to see them, but Apple is no better in that regard: they store your collections on their servers too (where else would they store them?).
Maps keeps your personal data in sync across all your devices using end-to-end encryption. Your Significant Locations and collections are encrypted end-to-end so Apple cannot read them. And when you share your ETA with other Maps users, Apple can’t see your location.
Other useful sections on that page worth reading: "Location Fuzzing", "Random Identifiers", and "(on-device) Personalization"
That’s interesting. Can you point to a reference for that?
I would have assumed that shared collections with a group of iCloud accounts would be e2e encrypted like iMessage groups are e2e encrypted. Glad to revisit that assumption.
My favorite feature of Google Maps is how it gets 10x slower when you turn location history off. And then it obnoxiously prompts you to turn it back on for an "improved user experience." I've duplicated this exact experience across several generations of smartphone including a relatively recent Galaxy S7. Turning location history back on makes the slowness go away.
Google's treatment of Android users vs. its treatment of iOS users for the same app is insightful: in the former case, the treatment imo borders on the abusive with mandatory and permanent changes required to data collection to be able to do trivial things such as activate a Google Assistant using the Home app.
Yeah, whenever my fiance or I try to search for a location, it takes maps several seconds to let us start typing. It only does this when we turn location history off. Honestly one of the things that drove me to stop using my G4 was this issue, because I had thought it was a performance issue with the phone. Then my fiance showed me how slow her S7 was with location history turned off versus on.
Regarding the prompt, it's always on in the search screen but starting a search makes it go away.
I just cold-started the Maps app, and search and keyboard opened instantly. May be try deleting the app data and cache? If not, not sure what's the issue honestly.
Google maps used to be fantastic, but in the last year or so it's become so fucking toxic - constantly spamming suggestions and asking questions, even during navigation (in other words, distracting me from driving!).
Apple maps may not be quite as good (the lack of cycling in my neck of the woods is annoying) but at least it's not trying to crash my car.
It is really annoying how it auto-switches to routes that it thinks will be faster.
"We've found you a faster route. Switching in 10 seconds if you don't press 'no thanks'..."
Come on, Google, there's a semi truck braking in front of me and I'm trying to make sure it's safe to change lanes, can this wait?
But the "is [reported hazard] still here?" bubbles don't bother me as much, since they go away after a few seconds. I think all of the cues are intended for passengers who are navigating for someone else, but the developers should keep in mind that some people use their phones as a standalone GPS navigator.
The teams are mostly 1099 contract workers through a third party with no benefits and no hope of advancement or future employment as full-time employee of Apple since their contract specifically expires in one year. They make around $20/hour usually right out of college in a town (Austin) with one of the fastest growing cost of living due to the influx of all the tech companies who got tired of the California scene and decided to move to Texas for the sweet tax cuts and business-friendly environment.
I'm sure the contract company siphons most of the contract value from Apple and the dedicated workers doing all the GIS work, the turn-by-turn descriptions, business identifications, etc. updating all the things that made the original Apple Maps such a delicious joke are left with an income that barely meets expenses in a town where those expenses are steadily rising. This job for them is just a resume filler though they aren't even allowed, due to NDA, to specify exactly what they do (what software or skills they use) or who they do it for when they update their resumes so that before the end of their one year contracts they can find a real career-type job.
It is a great update to a product that did originally suck though. It isn't Apple employees who are doing the actual work. They're the supervisors.
Apple gave them an option that was better than all others available to them. Otherwise they would be doing that other option instead. So thanks, Apple!
Then you obviously are not one of the $20/hr contractors referenced in my comment. I am willing to accept that there are other contractors involved who are earning more for their efforts. Congratulations to you and I hope you find tremendous success no matter where you choose to apply your talents.
Evidence of what? The rate of pay? The nature of employment of those doing the grunt work? The cost of living in the Austin area? The reason(s) why tech companies that had their start out of state open facilities in Texas? The general feeling that the first iteration of Apple Maps was substandard to the point where most agree that it sucked?
Your phrasing is ambiguous about what those teams actually do.
If it's just a data entry or "look at this picture and type down the name of the restaurant" job, then I'd say $20 is pretty good. If it's actual software engineering then yeah it's pretty terrible pay.
Honestly, the redesign aside, it's really impressive how quickly they are catching up with most Google Maps features. Given, I haven't tried these myself and can't attest to their quality, but in the article they list: Real-Time Transit info, Sharing ETA, Indoor Maps, etc. They also got street view, and more.
Of course, it's much easier to copy features than innovate, the latter takes years of UX research, while the former can simply just take all the lessons learned and implement the final iteration. That being said, it sounds like Apple has invested big time on their Maps team, doing so much is so little time is truly impressive.
I suppose it is a sign of a mature app that Apple Maps is now in it's "Google Maps" phase where the only "improvements" are frequent, unprompted redesigns that cut functionality to the bone and change old interaction patterns for little discernible reason.
The only thing I use Google Maps for at this point is checking peak times (for the gym) and, rarely, if I have to give someone else public transit route information
Transit app absolutely smokes Google Maps for transit directions in every city I've tried it in, if you're looking to reduce your Google footprint further. Depending on the city it also integrates with micomobility and car sharing and offers intermodal directions based on preferences.
This is a good piece of feedback for anyone at Waze, especially if you were willing to share more about your market details like where you live or any social networks you use, they could evaluate their advertising strategies.
It was an honest response to a valid question. I was quite surprised to see it, but after reflecting, things change in the software world so quickly (and new people are born all the time) that it's inevitable that today's staples will be forgotten tomorrow. Also, congrats, you're one of today's lucky 10,000! [0]
Downvotes weren't warranted IMO, but be careful complaining about downvotes on HN, it's against their usage guidelines [1]:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
While the Waze app is still separate from Google Maps, I am sure Google is using a ton of the previously Waze specific (mostly user sourced) data in Google Maps since they acquired it in 2013.
Waze would always route me through a spiderweb of neighborhood streets to save me a couple minutes of commute time back when I used to use it, but the main reason I switched is that I prefer the design of Apple Maps, and it works "good enough". Google Maps and Waze don't really feel like they fit into the iOS design guidelines, and the overhead of loading all that sponsored content within them just makes them feel sluggish while Apple Maps is always buttery smooth and keeps most of its interface out of your way when you're not using it.
I've used Apple Maps on multiple 2-5 hour drives recently, and the time estimates were pretty nearly bang-on in almost all the cases.
(The one exception was the time there were multiple significant tailbacks on the highway, with the amount of delay they were causing clearly shifting and changing minute-to-minute just from what we could see ourselves.)
Ahhhh so sick of companies featuring San Fran. The whole point is that it has better coverage Nation-wide. Pick literally anywhere else in the country!
Doesn't that make comparisons harder? Granted companies may game SF results, but looking at on companies downtown Houston map and anothers Sioux Falls isn't so helpful.
At this point, I absolutely hate when people use Apple Maps to find our community college. Apple just plain refuses to acknowledge the town we are located in exists. It also ignores all businesses on the reservation and points to the local Coca-Cola bottling location as the closest grocery store. I've filed bugs going back years and no changes.
Why do you think it was just a UI update? The headline from the article:
> New Apple Maps Designed with Better Road Coverage and Pedestrian Data, More Precise Addresses, and Detailed Land Cover
As well as many of the features highlighted by the article seems to allude to new data.
- Look Around
- Real-time transit information
- Flight status
- Indoor Maps
- Flyover (3D city scapes)
At the very least it sounds like they have added a whole bunch of data sources. They also claim that they have better road and pedestrian coverage...but offer no specifics. So whether these changes produce net "better" data foundation is unclear, but it sounds to me like more than just a visual update.
Have you tried emailing tcook at apple’s domain to get executive escalation team support? Not that that should be necessary of course, just exhausting all options for remediation.
I reported it on the Apple Maps site and filed a bug as a developer. I don't want to send stuff to the Apple executives when I might really need to get noticed for something that will really help the student's future.
Thanks, that makes more sense. Still, I would be surprised if any continuity between the two requests became a factor.
Even if it did, it would show you as someone looking out for students at a community college, something which would likely elevate the importance of the request. A bunch of potentially snarky students mocking Apple Maps/Apple Inc. on social media seems like a force multiplier that would work in your favor.
There are so many issues like this. People complain about TomTom maps never being updated in navigation systems because it's licensed, Apple Maps being crappy (or in this case, wrong), even Google Maps is often slow in updating (e.g. the tunnel in Maastricht took some time after it opened, which was known and announced years ahead) and very incomplete in terms of footpaths and trails.
The USA is probably the worst example, but globally, in the majority of places (geographically), OpenStreetMap does better at all of this: it's more complete and more up to date.
Pick a random point on earth on land, compare TomTom, Bing, Google, and OSM. Repeat 50 times. I did this and OSM was a very clear winner (it's still on my todo list to make a blog post with visuals, which is quite a bit more work than just doing it for myself).
Wow, OpenStreetMaps is worse which makes a bit of sense. Is there a good (step-by-step) tutorial on submitting data to OSM. I get the feeling if I can get the land grants people to submit their data it might make things a bit better.
For a well-defined project like this, I recommend getting in touch with people in the OSM US Slack workspace [0] for advice on possible data sources, mapping techniques, prior/duplicate efforts, etc.
Be careful about bulk uploading a pile of data you get. The licence has to be OK, and merging it into the existing OSM data can be pretty complicated. Imports are not suitable for beginners.
Was that using Radar? Did you try using the "Report an Issue" UI within the Maps app itself?
I've given up filing map bug reports for reservations. There's simply too many. It would be a full-time job for ten people to list all of the missing/wrong places in both Apple and Google maps. There are vast areas of the United States where paper maps are still far better. Indian reservations are among those.
Part of it is the fault of history. Many places on reservations don't have street addresses, or sometimes even streets. But that doesn't mean they aren't places of commerce, community, or otherwise vital to the lives of thousands of people.
Other times, though, there are towns and businesses on main or even state highways that don't exist on Google or Apple Maps at all.
I think a big part of the problem is that Google and Apple rely too heavily on social media and review sites for their geographic information. Those don't help when you're mapping an area with limited internet connectivity and zero cell service.
I'd quit my job to work for Apple mapping the chapter houses, trading posts, and other places on America's reservations. One person could only make a small dent, but every drop helps.
I guess city is a bit grand, but there are towns with actual zip codes on reservations.
Part of it is the fault of history. Many places on reservations don't have street addresses, or sometimes even streets. But that doesn't mean they aren't places of commerce, community, or otherwise vital to the lives of thousands of people.
The whole 911 thing started forcing road names and addresses. The bigger problem is that what we have for an address (as told to us by one of the utility companies) is different than whatever source Apple is using. Strangely, Google figured out quite a bit more of it.
And that’s why the “Hoover up all the data” approach will win. Google can snoop on everyone’s emails and locations and transaction receipts and find the location and names of businesses automatically, and even their opening hours.
Google has these sorts of problems too. It fails at correctly parsing examples straight out of the Canada Post Addressing Guidelines. [1]
Put in "10-123 Main St, Montreal QC H3Z 2Y7" into Google Maps and it will take you to "10 Main St, Montreal QC H3Z 5X3" Or, rather, it would if that was a real address. The correct building would be to "123 Main St, Montreal QC H3Z 2Y7".
Yeah, I copy pasted a postal address into Waze a few months ago. Little did I know! Waze sent me to the wrong spot and ignored the Canadian convention. Thought this was an odd mistake but now that you say it, i'll avoid it entirely.
You can use them from browser if you use duckduckgo as your search engine. There is still not an option to navigate there (if you are, for example, planning your trips in advance). Very basic, unfortunately.
Their international maps still don't look that great unfortunately. And there is still no ability to download offline maps like Google Maps, which is essential for avoiding international roaming fees. C'mon Apple, you make a billion dollars a day. Put a little more juice into this team.
i have been using Apple Maps exclusively for the past year (in Los Angeles and Denver/Boulder areas) with no issue/problems. Google Maps is cluttered with an ugly phantasmagoria of adverts and after a while of not needing to use it, i just deleted it from all my devices. The only feature i find myself wanting that Google Maps has that Apple Maps lacks is an "offline maps" feature.
What I hate most about Apple Maps is that reports about incorrect data never seem to go anywhere. Apple Maps thinks that the road that leads to my house is a one-way street. It's not. But because of this error Apple Maps always wants to send me on a 5 minutes detour if I try to use it to navigate home.
I've reported the problem twice but never got an answer or a correction. In fact all problems I've ever reported in the Maps app were completely ignored.
This is absolutely true, but it's not unique to Apple Maps. I've had an issue with the major road near my house in Google Maps for over three years, where it thinks a certain stretch is either absent or impassible. It shows it on the visual map, but it will go to astounding lengths to route you around that one-block stretch of (perfectly fine) road. I have reported it MANY times, and nothing has ever changed.
Same here, though it's usually a few hours, not minutes. I'm not in the US, tough, it may be that there are different review teams for different areas.
I have something like that too. There's a one block section that didn't have a road through it due to a water tower, but now (as in 10 years ago) does. Apple Maps routes me around it constantly. Despite error submissions _and_ the trip data that they must have, showing multitudes of vehicles apparently driving through a field to continue on the road... no change.
That's the nice thing with OpenStreetMap & mapping services using data from it.
You can just register to OSM and fix the data and that's it. The OSM interface will update almost instantly while services based on OSM data will get the fix once they do their next data update.
OSM edits have been an "optimistic lock" -- changes are deemed good until they are proven not good.. all changes in OSM have an author ID associated, so that they can search and "rollback" bad changes.. it has been that way since the beginning..
post-New York renamed and a few other embarrassments, there are new steps added for verification, by some workflows, but it is in transition AFAIK
Google and Apple should be able to infer the presence/status of roads based on telemetry from all the phones out there in the world. If a bunch of people regularly pass through a path at a car like speed, it’s likely a road.
Agreed - I'm curious how they are able to globally deploy so quickly where others (apple / tom tom) take FOREVER to update.
Do they just have someone ground truth with satellite and street view? They do have that data for most of the corrections I make (which are frankly rare).
Waze has volunteer local editors - I've hit "report map issue" and gotten messages from them with questions about what I was reporting. I wonder if Google leverages them internally.
Are temporary closures automated? I feel like in Waze I gave them enough information when reporting about things like construction or flooding that they could be integrated almost immediately--similar to road hazards or stopped vehicles.
Google maps doesn't even need you to report anything. I used to make a forbidden left turn every day on my way to work with Google maps running. After a while, it just updated the directions to include my bad driving: no report necessary.
There was a large sign at that intersection that said no left turn, which I disregarded because it was 6am and there were no cars there at all. Of course it's still possible that someone reported it, but that seems fairly unlikely.
Are you sure this isn't selective bias? Google and Apple both probably prioritize corrections like this based on the number of people reporting them. If you've reported this twice and no one else has, they have little incentive to prioritize this request over reports from more busy roadways.
What I hate most about Apple Maps is that reports about incorrect data never seem to go anywhere.
I wonder if this is geographic-specific.
I regularly report errors in Nevada, California, Arizona, and most recently Colorado, and they've always been corrected within a few weeks. I get an alert on my devices when it happens.
Sometimes they revert and I report them again, but I don't recall ever having a map error report ignored.
The turnaround time is actually one of the biggest reasons Apple under took this initiative.
Previously, issues were reported to Apple, who then had to vend them back to their data sources (TomTom amongst others). It was up to the data sources to implement the changes.
Now, issues reported to Apple can be immediately acted upon, or compared to other data, or reviewed by employees, or even can be marked for validation during another "drive-by".
> "There’s also the matter of corrections, updates and changes entering a long loop of submission to validation to update when you’re dealing with external partners. The Maps team would have to be able to correct roads, pathways and other updating features in days or less, not months. Not to mention the potential competitive advantages it could gain from building and updating traffic data from hundreds of millions of iPhones, rather than relying on partner data." from [0]
Yes, they originated all of the "Look-Around" data (equivalent to Street View), all of the 3D data, and much, if not all, of the road data. I believe they purchase satellite data. They built up their own fleet of vans. Today marks the last section of the country to switch over to the new system.
I have been wondering if it makes sense for Apple to also own the Satellite data with their own Satellite. Given how cheap it is to launch Satellite with Space X now. There was a rumours Apple hiring Satellite expert not a long while ago.
"Satellite" view of online maps is a misnomer. The photos are taken by aeroplane, which is why unpopulated areas like the oceans have very little data. That's not to say that satellite imagery is not used, just not for close-up stuff.
> What I hate most about Apple Maps is that reports about incorrect data never seem to go anywhere.
Wow, I've had the opposite experience. I've only used it a handful of times, but when I've reported incorrect phone numbers and such, it's always been fixed in just a few days, and I receive a notification through the app that they've done it. I found the experience to be impressively fast and painless. Sorry to hear it's not that way for everyone!
Where are you located, and what version of the OS were you running when you reported these things? For reference, I live near Palo Alto, and it's possible they are more responsive to requests here. I have only reported issues recently, with iOS 12/13.
Other comments mentioned Apple had issues correcting streets/routes because they had to be corrected downstream (they licensed from places like TomTom). Part of the goal of this update is to bring it all in-house improving the turnaround time.
I wonder if your corrections, like phone numbers, we're on Apple's end and much easier to correct?
Data flows downstream, from the maintainer or canonical source-of-truth to wherever it is used. It's changes in the opposite direction, upstream, that are expensive and slow.
I submitted a map correction to Google maps a few years back. They had our satellite office listed a quarter mile from where it actually was. I gave them the correct place with screenshots, verification I worked for the company, and arrows pointing to the exact location along with their own street view of the actual building. It took well over a month for them to respond and they still got it wrong. Now it shows us at the building two doors down from us, but at least that's better than a quarter mile.
For Apple Maps this is also country-dependent, since different countries/regions use different map data sources. The turnaround time for regions covered by Apple's own data would be fastest to change, I assume, followed by OpenStreetMap, with third-party vendor (e.g. TomTom) being the slowest. But I don't know how much OSM and TomTom are still used in Apple Maps.
About a year ago I noticed that for some reason Google Maps occasionally reported my house being 3 blocks from where it is. None of the other houses on my street had this issue. I filed a correction with Google expecting a long delay for it to be resolved. I received notification in 45 minutes to an hour that the issue had been resolved.
I have the same problem, except for me, when entering my address the resulting address the app chooses is over 30 minutes away (my neighborhood is about 18 months old).
I never use Apple maps, but I have found pretty much everyone else does. My address not being in there has become a huge hassle.
I also submitted a correction in the app to no avail. So I tweeted at AppleSupport and they assigned me a dedicated support person to handle my "case". It's been weeks now. The support person keeps calling me to tell me "no word yet from the engineering team".
Thankfully I'm moving soon, but this headache applies to all the new houses in this neighborhood.
Decent cosmetic upgrade. I just opened it to check out my home though and the road names are shifted halfway across the screen. Some are duplicated: both a name on the street, and then the name again out in the middle of nowhere. Guess there are a few glitches but those should be quick to clear up.
Along with cycling directions like others are asking for, I would love for them to add multi-destination navigation. It was really nice being able to make a detour to an ad-hoc location while navigating in GMaps, or plan a route with multiple stops ahead of time.
You can do so with Apple Maps. I do it regularly, but unfortunately you can only add it as an intermediate destination when en route to a destination. You can't pre-plan a multi-point trip which I feel like is a big oversight. I've wanted to estimate multi-day road trips and it doesn't seem possible with Apple Maps.
Wow, I didn't know this was possible. To anyone else who doesn't know this, while you're navigating, tapping or dragging up on the toolbar on the bottom of the screen causes it to expand and show a few options you can tap to add to your route. Unfortunately it's just a few preselected destination types, instead of a new search.
Hm, it seems different and more limited than the CarPlay UI. Yeah they really need to expand this feature. I thought you could have arbitrary search, but maybe that's on via CarPlay when stationary. Certainly there were more categories of things on CarPlay.
This reminds me of the individual who was doing an in-depth comparison of the history of Google Maps, Apple Maps, and how far ahead Google Maps was. They dove into comparisons for walking paths, "activity hot spots", green spaces, 3D mapping of buildings, etc. Does anyone remember the post and maybe has a link?
In the midst of the world (rightly) turning on big tech's abuses, efforts like these make me optimistic about our industry on a whole and help me recover some of the enthusiasm that led me into tech in the first place.
I love how this effort relies on & amplifies what were before relatively obscure specialties
The mapping wars elevate cartographers, mapping specialists, GIS data nerds, mobile computing / compression phds, GPS parsing engineers, ex-dod intertial navigation specialists, etc.
And rallied them around a massive, insanely big problem of mapping and organizing the entire physical world in real time and relying on consumer grade hardware to drive incredible fidelity.
It's humbling and really cool to see people that have dedicated their lives to these disciplines that were somewhat relegated to specialized use cases enter the "rockstar" stadium to deliver something that legitimately changes the way that billions of humans interact with the world
As much as I agree with your general sentiment, Apple Maps, like many of Apple's mobile apps, gets a boost from Apple's anti-competitive practices. It's utterly ridiculous that we can remove default apps from iOS, including Maps and Safari, but we can't set new default apps to replace them.
If we ever get serious about increasing competition in the tech sector, an easy place to start is letting users set default browsers, maps, and email clients on their devices.
Isn't that kind of self-defeating, though? Like the ACA without the individual mandate? The only way this works is if people use the apps on the iPhone. There's nothing stopping you from using Google Maps on an iPhone but, in order for the tech to improve while remaining strong with privacy, is for Apple to utilize their existing technology. Also, I disagree that it's anti-competitive. Users are always allowed and able to switch to another device/ecosystem.
The market is all the places the devices are sold. So global makes sense. If you define the market as San Francisco then Apple might have a monopoly. But that feels a little like market gerrymandering.
Even if you were going to restrict to just the US, Apple still sells fewer than 50% of the phones.
Fewer than 50% is different from "Google sells twice as many"
> The market is all the places the devices are sold.
Certainly US regulators / courts don't purport to have jurisdiction over foreign markets, agreed? The aforementioned EU case against Microsoft was about the EU market alone.
Because the user has an easy choice. Monopolies are not a problem in themselves, it’s when that monopoly is leveraged to crush competitors out of the overall market.
I seriously don’t understand why this sentiment(not yours) is so prevalent on HN. If we want competition in the tech sector, it seems to me that government enforcement of modulization would only hinder such competition. Why should a large corp’s web dev team care about mobile safari if they can just write on their page, “it seems you are using safari on mobile, we recommend downloading mobile chrome(AppStore hyperlink) and setting it to default, as of $PREVIOUSYEAR we will no longer support it.”? To me as things currently stand(that is Apple is not a monopoly), Apple’s walled garden approach absolutely embodies the spirit of a free market. Consumers have the choice of products and the defaultness of iPhones is fairly widely understood at the market level, best I can tell. Anecdotally of course, but almost all the l people I’ve talked to who buy an iPhone state that they buy it because they “don’t want to think about their phone” that seems fair to me.
Exactly! And, to my point that's being voted down, it really only works the way it's intended if they have the ability to control each step of the ecosystem. If they allow people to replace experiences at different points then it's not possible to ensure the consistency that Apple's really known for.
Google's market share globally dwarfs Apple's. That comparison isn't the same at all. If Google pushes their own products on consumers using the power it has established in that market, it's a monopoly and the EU is 100% in the right in enforcing restrictions to that. It's exactly the situation Microsoft found itself in during the 90s.
One specific thing that bothers me is that Microsoft got in trouble for bundling IE with Windows, but apple doesn't get in trouble when they block all browser apps that don't use Safari under the hood. How is this different? I want Google and Mozilla (and anyone else) to be able to make iOS browser apps from scratch if they want. It wouldn't be an issue if you could sideload apps easily, but the app store is really the only legit way to get apps on your non-jailbroken iPhone.
Apple doesn’t have sufficient market share to be considered a monopoly. That’s generally how they’ve skirted around the issue, and by positioning themselves as a premium brand, they can raise prices on their hardware to the point that market share remains sufficiently small to not be subject to monopoly laws.
At the time of the MS/IE lawsuit (2001), Microsoft Windows had well over 95% of desktop operating system market share.
The big differentiator here is that Microsoft had a dominant monopoly on PCs. Apple is a huge huge player in the smartphone space, but they're still in no danger of having a majority of the market.
Because the DOJ suit against MS was misguided and unnecessary. It had little effect on eroding Microsoft's supposed stranglehold on the browser market. When browser monoculture began to really hurt consumers and innovation the market found solutions through improved collaboration (W3C getting its act together, and developers embracing web standards), business model innovation (mozilla foundation embracing open source vs. Netscape charging $40 for a commercial license), and better technology and industry/community collaboration (khtml and webkit). Even some eventual deadends like Flash played a role at the time in routing around the untenable, but very temporary, situation of IE v.4-6 dominance.
Edit: I want to add that during the suit MS reps had a glib but prescient defense: "we think web browsers should be free". They meant as in beer, but they were right in the larger sense, and few would disagree with them today.
Netscape was arguing that their by-then totally crappy commercial browser deserved protection from the state, when their demise had a lot more to do with insane bloat and their embrace of groupware.
The issue with the browser (and sideloading) is security. Browsers by their nature are essentially apps that run arbitrary code from an unknown location. How do you ensure security of the devices if you don’t control the browser?
Safari is great on iOS. I’ve never felt the need to run something different. Same with sideloading apps. I’ve never seen the need for that. Maybe I’m an Apple fanboy but I think they’re doing the right thing in both cases.
One profession missing in the parent comment are the researchers innovating on differential privacy. Apple has taken great pains to figure out ways to improve their maps without storing massive amounts of private user data, to the extent that they split routes in half, fuzz addresses, and analyze the start and end of trips independently.
There's an argument that Google had such a huge head start on maps, that without Apple having the capacity to set defaults (on a platform that is not even a plurality of users), Apple Maps wouldn't have gotten enough users to justify improvements to where it is now. Apple also didn't get serious about having its own maps until Google attempted to exercise their at-the-time near-monopoly power to jack up licensing costs. Now the mere existence of Apple maps puts pressure on Google to improve the privacy features of its own map products as we've seen recently.
Apple funds map development through device sales, and Google does it through targeted advertising, map services for third parties, and profiling users. Do we value competition only of mapping products, or should we also value a diversity of business models for mapping products? It's no small decision to bring in the Kommissar.
Anyway it was clear that Google got leverage out of the deal, for instance they wouldn’t allow navigation while it was available on Android, no vector maps while they were available on Android etc.
While I sympathize with your viewpoint, you're imposing your personal values on consumers who demonstrate their willingness to exchange personal data for free services every day. You and many HN users may balk at this, but most people are ok with trading privacy for real-time traffic predictions. Apple shouldn't receive an unfair market advantage because they embody the values you hold dear.
Sidenote: I disagree that Apple Maps' success puts pressure on Google to up their privacy game. On the contrary, Google Maps comparative advantage is their data trove, as there are many more users of Google Maps than Apple Maps, so they seem more likely to lean on that to succeed.
I wouldn't look to the market to improve privacy, since as I said above, the market clearly doesn't care about privacy much at all. Without a seismic shift in public attitudes towards privacy, it's up to the government or the companies themselves to adapt.
By this same logic, consumers are willing to exchange their inability to set a default Maps app in exchange for the iPhone bundle, at the price Apple provides (discounted because of the services revenue they can extract.)
* Expands auto deletion of old data to include locations, and location searches
Now... this might not be due solely to competitive pressures from Apple, but it was a topic of conversations I had with pro-privacy Android users I know who have been warming up to iOS. Feature introductions like this definitely take the edge off.
> you're imposing your personal values on consumers who demonstrate their willingness to exchange personal data for free services every day.
Are they demonstrating their willingness, or do they simply not understand that there is a choice to be made? Considering the trivial difference in mapping performance in most places, I doubt most people would be willing to give up their privacy in exchange for saving a few seconds on their drive to the mall.
> Without a seismic shift in public attitudes towards privacy,
If people were truly aware of how much data is collected on them, how many people would opt in for the marginal benefits you get in return?
There have been so many opportunities for a grassroots pro-privacy movement to develop, and yet there isn't one. Devastating hacks (Target, Yahoo), election interference (CambridgeAnalytica), and yet nothing.
Acting as if people are unaware of data collection is disingenuous. If you told the average facebook user how much facebook and its third-party partners knew about them, I doubt many of them would stop using the platform.
You seem pretty disconnected from what normal people see and experience. Ask some random/ non-tech people about those hacks, data-breaches, and what their privacy expectations are when doing basic things like web searches. I guarantee you most people don't know who Cambridge Analytica is and couldn't tell you which major banks/ retailers have been breached.
It's not just ignorance, but a sense of helplessness. People don't feel in control and don't have any clue how they might reduce what data leaks out in their daily lives. The thing is, they are absolutely right.
I know and understand a lot of this stuff and I don't feel like I'm in control of my data. Even if you take precautions, Google and Facebook track your progress across the web. If you don't use Google Maps, Google still tracks your location using your IP address for network calls (often when you aren't deliberately connecting to Google services) and both Google and Facebook have been slurping up people's purchase history through credit card companies.
How is someone who doesn't have a clue about this stuff supposed to exert any control or choice when the people attacking their privacy out-gun them so thoroughly?
Are you saying users should give up freedom privacy( even though apple is willing to give up in china ). User choice is still better then corporate handouts.
....what are you talking about? This is just an update on yet another closed platform.
If apple cared about elevating the discipline and righting the abuses of big tech with their mapping app they'd partner with OpenStreetMap and make the data public rather than continuing to silo all the data about you and everyone around you.
Instead we're continuing the closed source data gathering land rush and trying to beat google at its own game.
If Apple was legally obligated to contribute back, they would do so.
They have a good history of community contribution (eg. Darwin, WebKit) so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, instead of some random anonymous internet commenter angst.
I’ve never heard that argument as to why Apple avoids the GPL.
I also don’t see how it is consistent with their behavior. For example, Apple wouldn’t need to change anything to bash to make its latest version run on MacOS. Yet, they don’t ship it.
On the other hand, the argument that they don’t avoid the GPL in general, but specifically GPLv3 because of legal concerns is consistent with their behavior. They shipped the latest GPLv2 licensed bash for years, but avoid any GPLv3 licensed version.
I don't think what you're posting is inconsistent with the observation the person you're replying to made -- Apple is hostile more specifically to GPL 3, which a lot of companies seem to be (rightly or wrongly). IIRC, a lot of GPL-licensed stuff that came with OS X, like bash, just stopped being updated by Apple when it moved from GPL 2 to 3; moving to zsh lets them keep their default shell up to date while also keeping whichever execs/lawyers have decreed "Thou Shalt Not GPL 3" happy.
Also, IIRC, Apple doesn't have a policy of prohibiting GPL-licensed software from being in the App Store, but rather, the FSF's own interpretation of the GPL is that its terms are incompatible with the App Store's terms.
> WebKit is open source software with portions licensed under the LGPL and BSD licenses available here.
Even though those licenses don't require it, Apple still actively develops and publishes enormous FOSS projects. Here's a page that lists more of them: https://developer.apple.com/opensource/
Apple gives back way more than they're legally required to. They don't like the GPLv3 specifically, but's worlds apart from saying they avoid the GPL or that they don't want to give back.
”I created a layer on top of an OSM map. What do I have to put under your license?
You have to determine whether what you have created is a Collective Work or a Derivative work, under the terms of the OSM licence.
If what you create is based on OSM data (for example if you create a new layer by looking at the OSM data and refering to locations on it) then it is likely you have created a derivative work.
If you generate a merged work with OSM data and other data (such as a printed map or pdf map) where the non-OSM data can no longer be considered to be separate and independent from the OSM data, is is likely you have created a derivative work.
If you overlay OSM data with your own data created from other sources (for example you going out there with a GPS receiver) and the layers are kept separate and independent, and the OSM layer is unchanged, then you may have created a collective work.
If you have created a derivative work, the work as a whole must be subject to the OSM licence. If you have created a collective work, then only the OSM component of the work must be subject to the OSM licence.”
IANAL, but I think anybody can overlay OSM data with traffic info, satellite photography, layers with names of shops, etc., without creating a derivative work.
What abuse? how is it right? It's the news industry that is leading and fuling attacks on tech companies for selfish financial reasons, and "big tech" is their term, it's a testament to their efficacy that people in tech drank that kool aid.
> It's humbling and really cool to see [cartographers, mapping specialists, GIS data nerds, mobile computing / compression phds, GPS parsing engineers, ex-dod intertial navigation specialists, etc.] enter the "rockstar" stadium to deliver something that legitimately changes the way that billions of humans interact with the world
The thing is, they did this before. But the interaction just wasn't direct. All of those people were doing important work for government and business organizations wherever getting around and knowing where you and other things are mattered, and improving the quality of services.
Now we get first-hand experience with their work, which is fantastic. Map apps are probably the thing that most enticed me onto a smart phone and the thing I'd have a hardest time giving up.
I just hope that every time we remember the before and after for these amazing conveniences, we remember that all these disciplines and professionals were important beforehand, and that there are others that are woven quietly into public and private life. Because there's a lot of voices right now that seem interested in burning down institutions and not enough curiosity in what those institutions have done for us.
Thanks, we'll be going strong for another 10 years :)
I think the business is very healthy. Headcount continues to grow, but not in a crazy way, and the great majority of the expenses are R&D. We're certainly default alive.
I've thought for a while that your Gaia Topo layer could be improved, especially because until now I don't think you had any hillshade at all for a topo map!
I spent some time checking out your map this morning, and it looks really nice at low zooms, but I'm still a little disappointed at high zooms. At zoom 13 the hillshading ends!
That's fair... we chose to drop the shading at that zoom, but we could be wrong. I think some people prefer a cleaner read when zoomed in so far (especially for field use), and shading also makes the tiles larger/slower to download.
Gaia GPS does have a separate raster hill-shading layer from ESRI you could layer on top, and we've been considering making our own (we already have an elevation data pipeline and create contour lines, so hill-shading isn't a huge step). Maybe that would have a special UX where you could choose to include it or not in your downloads.
That's true regarding file size. It is nice to have the option to overlay another hillshading layer.
I use Terrain RGB tiles that I [make myself](https://github.com/nst-guide/terrain#terrain-rgb), and having elevation data on the client opens up cool future possibilities like client-side viewshed analysis.
And thanks! The [style](https://github.com/nst-guide/osm-liberty-topo) and the rest of this project is open source. The style is a fork of osm-liberty, using the OpenMapTiles schema.
Interesting, I do a lot of backcountry with no cell and have mostly relied on old style maps turned to PDFs and downloaded or various OSM apps, this looks up my alley. One question though I often have for membership programs: how does it apply to families? I very much value all 4 of us in my household having the ability to share key apps and data, particularly for something that has safety applications. I see you have a Teams program but that looks commercially oriented. Apple has "Family Sharing" but for paid apps. How does that scenario work with Gaia Topo? If I grabbed a 5 year premium sub, would the kids be able to run off that too (at least while they're living at home) or does each individual need a separate membership?
Not trying to single you out or anything, I think a lot of the current app sales models and sub models are fairly individual focused at the present stage of things. More explicitly addressing couples/families (including what happens as they grow up/split) might be worth considering though, I think a lot of people will spend significantly more if it benefits links with household members.
You can share a Membership as long as you don't mind sharing the username/password combo. You'll all end up recording your data to the same account, if you record tracks, photos, etc.
Your family might not need a Membership at all though - that's only if you need to download maps for offline use, or if you want to use different map sources... Gaia Topo and all the features besides mass-downloading are free.
>that's only if you need to download maps for offline use
Well yeah that's pretty critical (particularly as a differentiator vs Apple Maps). I'm in northern New England, huge portions of north NY and VT/NH/ME have no cell coverage at all. Let alone Canada. Online maps are nearly useless not just for hiking and general backcountry work but even regular driving to job sites. My own town has no cell at all downtown, not just "no LTE", no cell coverage period. If you've ever looked at coverage maps the phone companies put out showing huge areas all nicely lit, know that they are flagrant lies that are finally even getting government attention. If you're interested, first search result article that came up is one from last year on VT going ahead and actually spending 6 weeks driving around the whole state testing themselves:
A touch different then what the cell companies claimed :).
Thank you very much for the reply though! It's good to know that, with the caveat of no individual profiles, an account could be shared around a bit without getting auto banned; I know some services do track that. FWIW, might be worth considering as a some-day feature to have a cut-down version of your Teams offering or a bundle as an official Family Plan, for a bit more money than standard with "up to 6" (or 5 or whatever) profiles. At any rate though, good to have more options to consider in mapping.
I just switched to an iPhone after being a long time Android user, and I've found Apple Maps directions not to be as good as Google Maps'. I live in central LA, and it regularly routes me through long and congested intersections.
Does anyone else feel this as well? Is it just my small sample size? I would like to continue using Apple Maps over Google Maps because of the integration with Apple Watch, but it's getting harder and harder each day to justify.
Traffic data is just not as good with Apple Maps. In some places they aggregate reports from traffic reporting agencies, but user-reporting is dependent on people using it and opting in to sharing data, but this is a challenge with a privacy-focused approach.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is piggybacking off of other apps' GPS location requests to aggregate traffic data in order to compete with how Google Maps uses its own algorithms for traffic.
As some one who exclusively uses Apple Maps on the west side of LA, I have found the routing to be similar or the same. The killer function for me is the HUD when I have it mounted on my dash. Light-years better. Also...the lane accuracy is unparalleled.
Waze is by far the best routing. It's better than Tesla routing, which I thought used Google Maps, and it's better than Apple Maps. There's no point in experimenting with anything else because Waze is just so much better, it's effectively a waste of time to try anything else.
That's funny because I feel like I've read a few articles out there that did comparative testing of Google Maps vs. Apple Maps and, while Google's routing estimated a shorter ETA, the Apple Maps routing ended up being faster and more accurate to the estimate nearly every time. I don't really want to think I'm going to get somewhere fast. I actually want to get there faster and, more importantly, when the app tells me I'm going to get there.
Over the last few years I've found Apple Maps get better and better in the Bay Area. I now default to Apple Maps as its routing, particularly for peninsula to city driving, is always faster/more efficient than Google Maps.
As a non Bay Area resident I can't say that compels me to think the app is any better. Seems like a lot of apps I use these days only work in the Bay Area.
DDG and Mozilla would loose a lot of users (and therefore value) if bought by apple. There is only a partial overlap in 'cultures', and they're both products where culture is very important.
This morning I noticed stop signs and traffic lights indicated on the map in CarPlay. Hadn’t seen that until today (to be fair I’m not in a major city by any stretch).
If they only could provide offline maps like google maps. That feature is fantastic in the desert areas in the west where you have no connectivity. Even the search function works great when offline.
Also search still works better in google maps. Apple Maps doesn’t find the Office Depot near me but one 100 miles away for example.
It’s sad that technology has actually regressed despite exponential increments in processing power and storage capacity.
It used to be that you could buy a mapping software and install it on your PDA/Pocket PC and it would run fine despite a CPU speed in the megahertz.
Nowadays offline maps is some niche advanced feature despite even low-end devices have enough processing power to come preinstalled with an offline map.
OpenStreetMaps has some good apps with offline support but their search function is usually pretty bad. If they could crack search OpenStreetMaps would be a winner.
It's a local service running on your device that handled offline data updates (all data packs are generated from SOM data) and then provides various services (routing/tiles/geocoding/advanced PoI search) based on this offline data to navigation apps running on the device.
I really nice concept IMHO, but I'm a bit biased as I'm the author of one of the navigation apps (modRana) that make use of OSM Scout Server if available on the device. :)
Check out MapFactor Navigator. Has a good single-line global offline search feature, usually two search terms (such as street/POI name and city or postal code) suffice.
Also very good turn by turn voice navigation, an intuitive touch UI and other things one likes to see in a GPS app.
Completely free on Android with OSM offline maps (which they distribute in a heavily compressed but rather complete format).
Not affiliated but wouldn't drive out of town without it. You can also buy and use commercial TomTom maps within the same app if preferred.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapfactor....
There is also an iOS version.
I have had this app for a long time. First on android, then on iOS. From what I see it has a google online search and then search through state, city and street. I can’t just you “Broadway , New York” or “Indian buffet” while offline. Otherwise the app is great.
Well the current Android version (don't know about iOS) _does_ have one-line offline search functionality. Perhaps you just need one or two more search terms.
Have you used offline maps in Google Maps? And compared it to the old mapping software you're talking about? It's kind of amazing, and frankly I often don't notice the difference between online and offline.
The maps sync on a regular basis, it's got detailed information about businesses including hours open, and it will route you different ways based on anticipated traffic at that time of day. It's also surprisingly not niche, as the app automatically sets up zones for places you visit frequently; odds are the majority of people use it without even realizing it.
I used that PDA software back in the day, and frankly it was pretty lacking. Route finding never took that much CPU. We moved to the cloud because the benefits of serving the data vastly outweighs the drawbacks for most people.
My point was that offline isn’t the default, which means most people don’t even know about it or wouldn’t have it enabled for the times they actually need it.
They're taking their sweet time with the implementation of their "Look Around" feature.
I passed an Apple Maps camera car in rural Idaho on a state highway in the summer of 2018. If they were already in that much of an "out of the way" place back then, it's surprising to see that they're just getting around to adding major cities now.
475 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadBack to waze i went.
Once you do so, you can select the wrong turn/other problem from the list of steps and describe the problem.
I'm no fan of Apple but I'd hardly call it's release disastrous.
(Disclosure: I work for Google)
I second parent commentator.
If you want reviews, pay secret shoppers. And if you want me to use your app, don't make it painfully obvious you're spying on exactly where I go and when to do what.
Use of the service essentially boils down to "I tell it where I am/where I want to go. It tells me how best to get there/how to find the thing I want to find."
I'm not sure how you would do that if you didn't share your location and destination/search terms with it.
But yeah, I disabled that thing too. Not because I considered a request for reviews a terrible overreach, but because it wasn't just in the Maps app, but rather a notification. I disable notifications on most non-messaging apps because they're annoying and naggy.
I don't want an app passively collecting data on me while I'm not using it.
I've had the location history disabled since it was possible to disable it, but I've since disabled all the notifications.
Sorry we're not all on valley pay rates here Google ;)
Source: I'm an ex Maps employee.
I couldn't find an easy way to turn it off in the app. All directions online lead to options that were already off. So like other users I had to restrict microphone access to google services entirely.
I have no idea if it's still listening.
Depending on your location, pedestrian traffic, streets, street traffic, etc. It might be best for you to be on the sidewalk. Or maybe you should instead be on the road since the road is only 25mph and there's pedestrians on the sidewalk. Maybe there's a bike lane, maybe there isn't. Maybe a town has a law saying you HAVE to bike on the road.
Are you allowed to cut through parking lots? Is it a dirt road? Can everyone's bikes handle dirt roads? What if it just rained, cars can still cross a wet dirt road, but I'd rather take a different route if possible on a bike.
That's not including the terrain challenges (which google seems to incorporate). I'd far rather take a route that takes an extra 5 minutes and is basically level vs a route that saves time but requires you to go down and uphill. Heck even wind conditions change can change the "optimal route" in some cases.
- For a limited number of cities, determine which streets the city lists as having separated bike lanes, painted bike lanes, or city-designated "bike friendly" streets. Mark them on the map appropriately in a different map overlay (or on the transit overlay)
- Bicycle directions prioritize those streets.
It's not perfect, but this would be enough for me to use the app.
Most of the painted bike lanes I see in suburban Washington are painted in some of the least safe bike routes. There's a ton of bike lanes that are just painted along major thoroughfares with actual top speeds of 40 or 45 miles per hour.
They should really do it by speed limit and presence of features that obstruct car traffic. Streets that are a pain in the ass to drive on are the best streets to bike on.
Even some of the Bike Routes in Seattle are on roads that I wouldn't feel safe biking on because traffic typically clocks at 10 or 15 MPH higher than the speed limit around the curves on the route.
They have elevation, private/public roads, road surface, bike lanes, etc, and routers can take it into account. Of course, that doesn't really take into account varying laws, but that might be reflected in the maps themselves (private/public places, bikes allowed/disallowed, etc).
See also https://www.opencyclemap.org
They use the designations “town” and “city” as a way of ranking places in terms of importance.
Here in the UK that designation is almost arbitrary.
There are several large towns with greater population and navigational importance than surrounding smaller cities.
All the commercial map providers, including Apple Maps, grok that. Only opensteetmap seems still rigidly to the town < city thing. Would be much better if they could use population instead.
If the OSM project is just about data then it’s doing a great job.
If it’s about a usable navigation experience too then it’s failing because in the UK it doesn’t take local politics into account when deciding what to display.
FWIW OSM was founded and is still heavily influenced by the UK. As a UK user I like it that ceremonial cities are tagged and displayed as such. YMMV.
What I have a big problem with is that major towns, by both population and local importance, are left off the map until you zoom to a low level.
I find this annoying enough that I actively avoid OSM based sites because it. It makes using OSM difficult to see major towns in relation other major cities.
Meanwhile there’ll be a tiny ceremonial city with a huge label over it.
I think that's usually the case.
This page [1] says:
> The law in most areas of the country require bicycles to follow the same rules of the road as other motor vehicles. In essence, riding your bike down the sidewalk is the same as if you hopped the curb and started rolling it in your car.
[1] https://www.campfirecycling.com/blog/2008/07/09/top-5-rules-...
> Bicycles may be ridden upon a sidewalk, but cyclists must yield the right-of-way to pedestrians and are required to give an audible signal before overtaking and passing a pedestrian.
And to make it even more complicated:
> Further, official traffic control devices or local ordinances may restrict bicycles on sidewalks in some areas.
[0] https://michiganbikelaw.com/michigan-rules-of-the-road/
i.e. riding on the sidewalk is more of an exception, and is typically allowed for kids.
This is pretty common, I believe. I looked up my local (Cambridge MA) laws and they say the same thing (and have a list of the sidewalks you can't bike on), and New York state looks the same.
In the dot.ny.gov FAQs, they explicitly say that sidewalk riding is legal unless posted, but is specifically intended more for young children.
Depending on location indeed. The majority of US states still make it blanket illegal to bicycle on a sidewalk, codified into early highway laws. (It's also probable the last time those laws were effectively enforced was somewhere in the middle of the 20th Century.) There are states where it is illegal, but individual counties or cities (or strange in-betweens like townships) override their state laws and allow it. I don't know of any examples of the opposite where a state allows it, but individual towns forbid it, but I wouldn't be surprised.
https://michiganbikelaw.com/michigan-rules-of-the-road/
I run cycle.travel (https://cycle.travel/map) which offers super-fast bike directions in Europe, North America and Australia/NZ. It has a number of unique features under the hood that I think lift the quality of its routes above other similar sites (but then I would say that). Always happy to entertain offers if Apple want to buy me...
You can see similar assumptions in how Siri is designed. (“Users only speak one language at a time”) or the effectiveness of multilanguage support in autocorrect. Most people outside north america use their own language + english fairly frequently. At least those in apple’s customer demographic.
Bicycle directions are more challenging than directions for cars, public transit, and walking. I’m just speaking from my own personal experience, here. In every city I’ve lived in, I’ve had to test out different bicycle commuting routes until I found one which I liked. Walking and driving I will just take the fastest route and be done with it. Everyone has different preferences for bicycling for how much elevation climb they can handle, how much traffic they tolerate, etc.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/this-heat-map-shows-a-fundam...
It reminds me of some advice given to me by a heavily successful industrialist friend — never dismiss your competition, for the world is not static.
They had no place to go but up. That first version was absolutely embarrassing. I'm honestly surprised they were allowed to make it this far. To this day, I still do not use Apple Maps. As much as they try to get me to use it with all of the iOS embedding they've done, I still won't use it.
Look at the previous coverage on this blog - https://www.justinobeirne.com/
"Apple completed the rollout of this new Maps experience in the United States and will begin rolling it out across Europe in the coming months."
In the old days of Macromedia Freehand and Adobe Illustrator, each version would add features and updates that would make it slightly better than the other. I would use it until the other came out with their new version. It was a constant ping pong/leapfrog of competing products trying to win until Adobe ultimately won outright. In my testing, not once has Apple Maps leapfrogged to be the leading app.
Apple Maps is a lot cleaner but the only thing missing was the quality of the actual maps. Hopefully that has changed now.
It's true that Google gets to see them, but Apple is no better in that regard: they store your collections on their servers too (where else would they store them?).
End-to-end encryption
Maps keeps your personal data in sync across all your devices using end-to-end encryption. Your Significant Locations and collections are encrypted end-to-end so Apple cannot read them. And when you share your ETA with other Maps users, Apple can’t see your location.
Other useful sections on that page worth reading: "Location Fuzzing", "Random Identifiers", and "(on-device) Personalization"
From: https://www.apple.com/privacy/features/
Don't spread misinformation on privacy, it'll mislead people into sharing too much data.
I would have assumed that shared collections with a group of iCloud accounts would be e2e encrypted like iMessage groups are e2e encrypted. Glad to revisit that assumption.
Disc: Googler but nowhere close to Maps.
Regarding the prompt, it's always on in the search screen but starting a search makes it go away.
Apple maps may not be quite as good (the lack of cycling in my neck of the woods is annoying) but at least it's not trying to crash my car.
"We've found you a faster route. Switching in 10 seconds if you don't press 'no thanks'..."
Come on, Google, there's a semi truck braking in front of me and I'm trying to make sure it's safe to change lanes, can this wait?
But the "is [reported hazard] still here?" bubbles don't bother me as much, since they go away after a few seconds. I think all of the cues are intended for passengers who are navigating for someone else, but the developers should keep in mind that some people use their phones as a standalone GPS navigator.
I'm sure the contract company siphons most of the contract value from Apple and the dedicated workers doing all the GIS work, the turn-by-turn descriptions, business identifications, etc. updating all the things that made the original Apple Maps such a delicious joke are left with an income that barely meets expenses in a town where those expenses are steadily rising. This job for them is just a resume filler though they aren't even allowed, due to NDA, to specify exactly what they do (what software or skills they use) or who they do it for when they update their resumes so that before the end of their one year contracts they can find a real career-type job.
It is a great update to a product that did originally suck though. It isn't Apple employees who are doing the actual work. They're the supervisors.
If it's just a data entry or "look at this picture and type down the name of the restaurant" job, then I'd say $20 is pretty good. If it's actual software engineering then yeah it's pretty terrible pay.
Of course, it's much easier to copy features than innovate, the latter takes years of UX research, while the former can simply just take all the lessons learned and implement the final iteration. That being said, it sounds like Apple has invested big time on their Maps team, doing so much is so little time is truly impressive.
As if the quality of the town they got sent to is somehow relevant?
You enter 1234 East Main Street and it sends you to 1234 West Main Street.
I've had this happen to me multiple times in both Minneapolis and Albuquerque. Strangely, it only seems to happen while in foot, not while driving.
https://transitapp.com/region/sf-bay-area#all-regions
EDIT: Holy downvotes, I didn't mean it as anything negative, I actually had to Google it. You can't hear about everything :3
It was an honest response to a valid question. I was quite surprised to see it, but after reflecting, things change in the software world so quickly (and new people are born all the time) that it's inevitable that today's staples will be forgotten tomorrow. Also, congrats, you're one of today's lucky 10,000! [0]
Downvotes weren't warranted IMO, but be careful complaining about downvotes on HN, it's against their usage guidelines [1]:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/11/its-official-google-buys-w...
(The one exception was the time there were multiple significant tailbacks on the highway, with the amount of delay they were causing clearly shifting and changing minute-to-minute just from what we could see ourselves.)
Privacy and UI cannot overcome really poor data.
> New Apple Maps Designed with Better Road Coverage and Pedestrian Data, More Precise Addresses, and Detailed Land Cover
As well as many of the features highlighted by the article seems to allude to new data.
- Look Around
- Real-time transit information
- Flight status
- Indoor Maps
- Flyover (3D city scapes)
At the very least it sounds like they have added a whole bunch of data sources. They also claim that they have better road and pedestrian coverage...but offer no specifics. So whether these changes produce net "better" data foundation is unclear, but it sounds to me like more than just a visual update.
Even if it did, it would show you as someone looking out for students at a community college, something which would likely elevate the importance of the request. A bunch of potentially snarky students mocking Apple Maps/Apple Inc. on social media seems like a force multiplier that would work in your favor.
The USA is probably the worst example, but globally, in the majority of places (geographically), OpenStreetMap does better at all of this: it's more complete and more up to date.
Pick a random point on earth on land, compare TomTom, Bing, Google, and OSM. Repeat 50 times. I did this and OSM was a very clear winner (it's still on my todo list to make a blog post with visuals, which is quite a bit more work than just doing it for myself).
It's pretty easy, you just make an account, pick an editor and start making outlines and tagging stuff
[0]: https://osmus-slack.herokuapp.com/
Be careful about bulk uploading a pile of data you get. The licence has to be OK, and merging it into the existing OSM data can be pretty complicated. Imports are not suitable for beginners.
> I've filed bugs
Was that using Radar? Did you try using the "Report an Issue" UI within the Maps app itself?
Not a city. He notes this is on a reservation.
Was that using Radar? Did you try using the "Report an Issue" UI within the Maps app itself?
I've given up filing map bug reports for reservations. There's simply too many. It would be a full-time job for ten people to list all of the missing/wrong places in both Apple and Google maps. There are vast areas of the United States where paper maps are still far better. Indian reservations are among those.
Part of it is the fault of history. Many places on reservations don't have street addresses, or sometimes even streets. But that doesn't mean they aren't places of commerce, community, or otherwise vital to the lives of thousands of people.
Other times, though, there are towns and businesses on main or even state highways that don't exist on Google or Apple Maps at all.
I think a big part of the problem is that Google and Apple rely too heavily on social media and review sites for their geographic information. Those don't help when you're mapping an area with limited internet connectivity and zero cell service.
I'd quit my job to work for Apple mapping the chapter houses, trading posts, and other places on America's reservations. One person could only make a small dent, but every drop helps.
I guess city is a bit grand, but there are towns with actual zip codes on reservations.
Part of it is the fault of history. Many places on reservations don't have street addresses, or sometimes even streets. But that doesn't mean they aren't places of commerce, community, or otherwise vital to the lives of thousands of people.
The whole 911 thing started forcing road names and addresses. The bigger problem is that what we have for an address (as told to us by one of the utility companies) is different than whatever source Apple is using. Strangely, Google figured out quite a bit more of it.
Put in "10-123 Main St, Montreal QC H3Z 2Y7" into Google Maps and it will take you to "10 Main St, Montreal QC H3Z 5X3" Or, rather, it would if that was a real address. The correct building would be to "123 Main St, Montreal QC H3Z 2Y7".
[1]: https://www.canadapost.ca/tools/pg/manual/PGaddress-e.asp?ec...
DDG has been using Apple Maps via browser for the last year or two IIRC.
I've reported the problem twice but never got an answer or a correction. In fact all problems I've ever reported in the Maps app were completely ignored.
This is why I don't use Apple Maps.
I'm also a local guide though so that might have something to do with it
You can just register to OSM and fix the data and that's it. The OSM interface will update almost instantly while services based on OSM data will get the fix once they do their next data update.
post-New York renamed and a few other embarrassments, there are new steps added for verification, by some workflows, but it is in transition AFAIK
On average, Google is significantly faster at processing them, though.
Do they just have someone ground truth with satellite and street view? They do have that data for most of the corrections I make (which are frankly rare).
I wonder if this is geographic-specific.
I regularly report errors in Nevada, California, Arizona, and most recently Colorado, and they've always been corrected within a few weeks. I get an alert on my devices when it happens.
Sometimes they revert and I report them again, but I don't recall ever having a map error report ignored.
Previously, issues were reported to Apple, who then had to vend them back to their data sources (TomTom amongst others). It was up to the data sources to implement the changes.
Now, issues reported to Apple can be immediately acted upon, or compared to other data, or reviewed by employees, or even can be marked for validation during another "drive-by".
> "There’s also the matter of corrections, updates and changes entering a long loop of submission to validation to update when you’re dealing with external partners. The Maps team would have to be able to correct roads, pathways and other updating features in days or less, not months. Not to mention the potential competitive advantages it could gain from building and updating traffic data from hundreds of millions of iPhones, rather than relying on partner data." from [0]
[0] - https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...
Wow, I've had the opposite experience. I've only used it a handful of times, but when I've reported incorrect phone numbers and such, it's always been fixed in just a few days, and I receive a notification through the app that they've done it. I found the experience to be impressively fast and painless. Sorry to hear it's not that way for everyone!
Where are you located, and what version of the OS were you running when you reported these things? For reference, I live near Palo Alto, and it's possible they are more responsive to requests here. I have only reported issues recently, with iOS 12/13.
I wonder if your corrections, like phone numbers, we're on Apple's end and much easier to correct?
Data flows downstream, from the maintainer or canonical source-of-truth to wherever it is used. It's changes in the opposite direction, upstream, that are expensive and slow.
I live in Germany and I think I was running iOS 12 when I reported the issues.
Maybe Apple only looks at reports in the USA...
I call this "minimalist customer service".
I never use Apple maps, but I have found pretty much everyone else does. My address not being in there has become a huge hassle.
I also submitted a correction in the app to no avail. So I tweeted at AppleSupport and they assigned me a dedicated support person to handle my "case". It's been weeks now. The support person keeps calling me to tell me "no word yet from the engineering team".
Thankfully I'm moving soon, but this headache applies to all the new houses in this neighborhood.
Along with cycling directions like others are asking for, I would love for them to add multi-destination navigation. It was really nice being able to make a detour to an ad-hoc location while navigating in GMaps, or plan a route with multiple stops ahead of time.
https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
I love how this effort relies on & amplifies what were before relatively obscure specialties
The mapping wars elevate cartographers, mapping specialists, GIS data nerds, mobile computing / compression phds, GPS parsing engineers, ex-dod intertial navigation specialists, etc.
And rallied them around a massive, insanely big problem of mapping and organizing the entire physical world in real time and relying on consumer grade hardware to drive incredible fidelity.
It's humbling and really cool to see people that have dedicated their lives to these disciplines that were somewhat relegated to specialized use cases enter the "rockstar" stadium to deliver something that legitimately changes the way that billions of humans interact with the world
If we ever get serious about increasing competition in the tech sector, an easy place to start is letting users set default browsers, maps, and email clients on their devices.
If Google restricted the user in the same way, that would arguably be closer to the Microsoft situation because their marketshare is 2x Apple's.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/620805/smartphone-sales-...
Even if you were going to restrict to just the US, Apple still sells fewer than 50% of the phones.
> The market is all the places the devices are sold.
Certainly US regulators / courts don't purport to have jurisdiction over foreign markets, agreed? The aforementioned EU case against Microsoft was about the EU market alone.
- Strong encryption - Privacy Protections - Not using user data
Google would like you to have a discussion with the EU on their behalf.
At the time of the MS/IE lawsuit (2001), Microsoft Windows had well over 95% of desktop operating system market share.
Edit: I want to add that during the suit MS reps had a glib but prescient defense: "we think web browsers should be free". They meant as in beer, but they were right in the larger sense, and few would disagree with them today.
Netscape was arguing that their by-then totally crappy commercial browser deserved protection from the state, when their demise had a lot more to do with insane bloat and their embrace of groupware.
Safari is great on iOS. I’ve never felt the need to run something different. Same with sideloading apps. I’ve never seen the need for that. Maybe I’m an Apple fanboy but I think they’re doing the right thing in both cases.
One profession missing in the parent comment are the researchers innovating on differential privacy. Apple has taken great pains to figure out ways to improve their maps without storing massive amounts of private user data, to the extent that they split routes in half, fuzz addresses, and analyze the start and end of trips independently.
There's an argument that Google had such a huge head start on maps, that without Apple having the capacity to set defaults (on a platform that is not even a plurality of users), Apple Maps wouldn't have gotten enough users to justify improvements to where it is now. Apple also didn't get serious about having its own maps until Google attempted to exercise their at-the-time near-monopoly power to jack up licensing costs. Now the mere existence of Apple maps puts pressure on Google to improve the privacy features of its own map products as we've seen recently.
Apple funds map development through device sales, and Google does it through targeted advertising, map services for third parties, and profiling users. Do we value competition only of mapping products, or should we also value a diversity of business models for mapping products? It's no small decision to bring in the Kommissar.
That was never going to work for Apple.
Sidenote: I disagree that Apple Maps' success puts pressure on Google to up their privacy game. On the contrary, Google Maps comparative advantage is their data trove, as there are many more users of Google Maps than Apple Maps, so they seem more likely to lean on that to succeed.
I wouldn't look to the market to improve privacy, since as I said above, the market clearly doesn't care about privacy much at all. Without a seismic shift in public attitudes towards privacy, it's up to the government or the companies themselves to adapt.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/technology/safety-s...
* Added incognito mode to maps
* Expands auto deletion of old data to include locations, and location searches
Now... this might not be due solely to competitive pressures from Apple, but it was a topic of conversations I had with pro-privacy Android users I know who have been warming up to iOS. Feature introductions like this definitely take the edge off.
Are they demonstrating their willingness, or do they simply not understand that there is a choice to be made? Considering the trivial difference in mapping performance in most places, I doubt most people would be willing to give up their privacy in exchange for saving a few seconds on their drive to the mall.
> Without a seismic shift in public attitudes towards privacy,
If people were truly aware of how much data is collected on them, how many people would opt in for the marginal benefits you get in return?
Acting as if people are unaware of data collection is disingenuous. If you told the average facebook user how much facebook and its third-party partners knew about them, I doubt many of them would stop using the platform.
It's not just ignorance, but a sense of helplessness. People don't feel in control and don't have any clue how they might reduce what data leaks out in their daily lives. The thing is, they are absolutely right.
I know and understand a lot of this stuff and I don't feel like I'm in control of my data. Even if you take precautions, Google and Facebook track your progress across the web. If you don't use Google Maps, Google still tracks your location using your IP address for network calls (often when you aren't deliberately connecting to Google services) and both Google and Facebook have been slurping up people's purchase history through credit card companies.
How is someone who doesn't have a clue about this stuff supposed to exert any control or choice when the people attacking their privacy out-gun them so thoroughly?
Then buy Android if that's a tradeoff you're willing to make.
This is so disingenuous. It's called Android. People hate it. Although the walled garden may offend you personally, the market at large has spoken.
It's probably enough to make anyone switch to Android, but it can still be a welcome addition to iOS
Not setting a default is bad too. Wish I could get there.
If apple cared about elevating the discipline and righting the abuses of big tech with their mapping app they'd partner with OpenStreetMap and make the data public rather than continuing to silo all the data about you and everyone around you.
Instead we're continuing the closed source data gathering land rush and trying to beat google at its own game.
Are you suggesting Google didnt elevate the discipline of search because their backend is closed?
(Source: Talk by Apple employee at the OSM'a 'State of the Map' conference 2018 https://2018.stateofthemap.org/2018/T081-Working_with_the_Co... )
I’m genuinely curious why you think they should do this.
Because they would be legally obligated to when using OSM as a base for anything.
Also, because it would benefit society.
They have a good history of community contribution (eg. Darwin, WebKit) so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, instead of some random anonymous internet commenter angst.
I also don’t see how it is consistent with their behavior. For example, Apple wouldn’t need to change anything to bash to make its latest version run on MacOS. Yet, they don’t ship it.
On the other hand, the argument that they don’t avoid the GPL in general, but specifically GPLv3 because of legal concerns is consistent with their behavior. They shipped the latest GPLv2 licensed bash for years, but avoid any GPLv3 licensed version.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT208050
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20090193
Apple has historically been hostile to the GPL. Remember when Apple removed the GPLv2-licensed VLC from the App Store in 2011?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/01/vlc-for-ios-vanishes...
VLC didn't return to the App Store until the iOS version was dual-licensed under the MPL 30 months later.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/07/vlc-media-player-ret...
Also, IIRC, Apple doesn't have a policy of prohibiting GPL-licensed software from being in the App Store, but rather, the FSF's own interpretation of the GPL is that its terms are incompatible with the App Store's terms.
> WebKit is open source software with portions licensed under the LGPL and BSD licenses available here.
Even though those licenses don't require it, Apple still actively develops and publishes enormous FOSS projects. Here's a page that lists more of them: https://developer.apple.com/opensource/
Apple gives back way more than they're legally required to. They don't like the GPLv3 specifically, but's worlds apart from saying they avoid the GPL or that they don't want to give back.
”I created a layer on top of an OSM map. What do I have to put under your license?
You have to determine whether what you have created is a Collective Work or a Derivative work, under the terms of the OSM licence.
If what you create is based on OSM data (for example if you create a new layer by looking at the OSM data and refering to locations on it) then it is likely you have created a derivative work.
If you generate a merged work with OSM data and other data (such as a printed map or pdf map) where the non-OSM data can no longer be considered to be separate and independent from the OSM data, is is likely you have created a derivative work.
If you overlay OSM data with your own data created from other sources (for example you going out there with a GPS receiver) and the layers are kept separate and independent, and the OSM layer is unchanged, then you may have created a collective work.
If you have created a derivative work, the work as a whole must be subject to the OSM licence. If you have created a collective work, then only the OSM component of the work must be subject to the OSM licence.”
IANAL, but I think anybody can overlay OSM data with traffic info, satellite photography, layers with names of shops, etc., without creating a derivative work.
In reality, the market offers rewards proportional to value that can be withheld, as leverage for price negotiation.
It would be a big deal to create an economic system that reliably measures and rewards benefit to society. I haven't the faintest idea how.
The thing is, they did this before. But the interaction just wasn't direct. All of those people were doing important work for government and business organizations wherever getting around and knowing where you and other things are mattered, and improving the quality of services.
Now we get first-hand experience with their work, which is fantastic. Map apps are probably the thing that most enticed me onto a smart phone and the thing I'd have a hardest time giving up.
I just hope that every time we remember the before and after for these amazing conveniences, we remember that all these disciplines and professionals were important beforehand, and that there are others that are woven quietly into public and private life. Because there's a lot of voices right now that seem interested in burning down institutions and not enough curiosity in what those institutions have done for us.
This is such a Silicon Valley perspective.
Gaia Topo focuses on the backcountry, and specifically downloading for offline use: https://blog.gaiagps.com/easy-to-read-tiny-to-download-the-a...
With the current pricing and amount of users, is it a sustainable business?
I think the business is very healthy. Headcount continues to grow, but not in a crazy way, and the great majority of the expenses are R&D. We're certainly default alive.
I spent some time checking out your map this morning, and it looks really nice at low zooms, but I'm still a little disappointed at high zooms. At zoom 13 the hillshading ends!
For example, at zoom 14, I still much prefer a map with a hillshade (my own work): https://www.gaiagps.com/map/?loc=14.0/-121.1500/48.1582&laye... https://nst.guide/#14/48.1582/-121.15
Gaia GPS does have a separate raster hill-shading layer from ESRI you could layer on top, and we've been considering making our own (we already have an elevation data pipeline and create contour lines, so hill-shading isn't a huge step). Maybe that would have a special UX where you could choose to include it or not in your downloads.
I dig your map style!
I use Terrain RGB tiles that I [make myself](https://github.com/nst-guide/terrain#terrain-rgb), and having elevation data on the client opens up cool future possibilities like client-side viewshed analysis.
And thanks! The [style](https://github.com/nst-guide/osm-liberty-topo) and the rest of this project is open source. The style is a fork of osm-liberty, using the OpenMapTiles schema.
There is a Skip button in the top right corner of the opening screen, or the Register screen. Ping me at andrew@gaiagps.com if you can't find it.
Not trying to single you out or anything, I think a lot of the current app sales models and sub models are fairly individual focused at the present stage of things. More explicitly addressing couples/families (including what happens as they grow up/split) might be worth considering though, I think a lot of people will spend significantly more if it benefits links with household members.
Your family might not need a Membership at all though - that's only if you need to download maps for offline use, or if you want to use different map sources... Gaia Topo and all the features besides mass-downloading are free.
Well yeah that's pretty critical (particularly as a differentiator vs Apple Maps). I'm in northern New England, huge portions of north NY and VT/NH/ME have no cell coverage at all. Let alone Canada. Online maps are nearly useless not just for hiking and general backcountry work but even regular driving to job sites. My own town has no cell at all downtown, not just "no LTE", no cell coverage period. If you've ever looked at coverage maps the phone companies put out showing huge areas all nicely lit, know that they are flagrant lies that are finally even getting government attention. If you're interested, first search result article that came up is one from last year on VT going ahead and actually spending 6 weeks driving around the whole state testing themselves:
https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/local/vermont...
A touch different then what the cell companies claimed :).
Thank you very much for the reply though! It's good to know that, with the caveat of no individual profiles, an account could be shared around a bit without getting auto banned; I know some services do track that. FWIW, might be worth considering as a some-day feature to have a cut-down version of your Teams offering or a bundle as an official Family Plan, for a bit more money than standard with "up to 6" (or 5 or whatever) profiles. At any rate though, good to have more options to consider in mapping.
Edit: Although can you tell me whether there's a way, on iOS, to have the map not switch to dark mode when my device is in dark mode?
Does anyone else feel this as well? Is it just my small sample size? I would like to continue using Apple Maps over Google Maps because of the integration with Apple Watch, but it's getting harder and harder each day to justify.
What do you mean? That the phone's screen provides turn by turn instructions, while the car's screen provides more a trip/map perspective?
edit: i just realized that I can use the phone's screen for turn by turn, and have the car's screen display music, or whatever else!!!
That was just improved in iOS 13, shame it took so long.
Then... maybe purchasing Mozilla for networking suite?
Also search still works better in google maps. Apple Maps doesn’t find the Office Depot near me but one 100 miles away for example.
It used to be that you could buy a mapping software and install it on your PDA/Pocket PC and it would run fine despite a CPU speed in the megahertz.
Nowadays offline maps is some niche advanced feature despite even low-end devices have enough processing power to come preinstalled with an offline map.
https://github.com/rinigus/osmscout-server
It's a local service running on your device that handled offline data updates (all data packs are generated from SOM data) and then provides various services (routing/tiles/geocoding/advanced PoI search) based on this offline data to navigation apps running on the device.
I really nice concept IMHO, but I'm a bit biased as I'm the author of one of the navigation apps (modRana) that make use of OSM Scout Server if available on the device. :)
The maps sync on a regular basis, it's got detailed information about businesses including hours open, and it will route you different ways based on anticipated traffic at that time of day. It's also surprisingly not niche, as the app automatically sets up zones for places you visit frequently; odds are the majority of people use it without even realizing it.
I used that PDA software back in the day, and frankly it was pretty lacking. Route finding never took that much CPU. We moved to the cloud because the benefits of serving the data vastly outweighs the drawbacks for most people.
I passed an Apple Maps camera car in rural Idaho on a state highway in the summer of 2018. If they were already in that much of an "out of the way" place back then, it's surprising to see that they're just getting around to adding major cities now.
... but I honestly can't tell if this has the new stuff or not.