What service did DDG use before Apple Maps?
Mapbox.
DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
141–150 of 284 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple has taken good stances on most privacy issues, but Apple Maps is poorly run. The main failure is not having something akin to a Google Scout, whereby iOS users could submit info about businesses and streets that lack data. Apple instead hires a ton of contractors in Austin (and now India) to manually trace roads and guess business hours based on anonymized GPS traces. Apple lacks the scale of Google's army of u…
This is not 100% true, if you go to an existing business listing and scroll to the bottom there's a "report an issue" option. Apple has fixed my reported issues within a few days in the past. In another sense I'm not sure why it should matter to the end user how many interns Apple hires to do things behind the scenes. I'm imagining that Apple is well aware of these shortcomings. Not only that I wonder if operational…
These user reports take weeks to months to get triaged, making many rather useless.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#143Does anyone else see Apple buying DDG in the near future?
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me the issue is my own home address. I own an iphone and verified it. Typing out my direction: Address, City, State, Zip Code will direct you to an address in the neighboring city with a similar looking address(address number is wrong and Ave is Street). I give people a neighboring address close to me that I know works if they own an iphone. Apple Maps has also gotten me lost or stuck in terrible traffic. I reall…
That's remarkably bizarre. Typing out a full structured address should always be parsed correctly. Have you reported this to Apple? The Apple Maps apps (iPhone and macOS) have a means by which you can report a variety of issues, including incorrect search results. In my experience Apple tends to be pretty good about handling these.
My address also kicks off this issue in Apple Maps. I live on XYZ Street, it will send you off to XYZ Road on the other end of the city.
I never reported it as I just immediately went back to Google Maps, but I'll do that now, good suggestion.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#145Does anyone else see Apple buying DDG in the near future?
Would people continue to use it if that happened? I feel like that would defeat some of the point of the service.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#146> For example, try a query such as "coffee shops" and zoom in on the map to refine your search. There is exactly one result for "coffee shops" in San Francisco. The tech and privacy initiatives sound good, but unfortunately the data needs work to pass basic sanity checks. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coffee+shops&ia=web&iaxm=maps&stri... Edit: Searching for "coffee shop" (singular) shows many more results. Perhaps the b…
Now imagine how bad it is outside of the SF bubble. I searched for coffee shops and the closest result to me is 7 hours drive away.
Coffee shops gets me 3 results in my city, coffee shop gets me 4 results with the closest 45 miles away. Totally useless.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#147I was a big defender of Apple Maps, largely because I almost never saw any problems with the data. Then I moved into an apartment complex in which Apple had the driveway in the wrong place.
I've moved since, so I'll spell it out: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=5940+Arapaho+Rd%2C+75248&t=osx&ia=...
Apple Maps believes that the driveways are to the south and east, but in fact the front driveway--the main entrance--is to the north, and there is no direct passage from the east. So every set of directions to or from those apartments begins or ends incorrectly. When leaving, I just have to guess whether I should turn east on Arapaho to catch up to where Maps thinks I should have ended up on Preston to start out, or whether it will send me west on Arapaho once it realizes I'm already most of a block in that direction from Preston. It added a minute or two to every trip, and delivery people would fail to find my apartment unless I specifically said "don't use Apple Maps." So I started saying that to everyone, all the time.
Apple's commitment to privacy means that they deliberately don't track the beginning or ending of any trip, but that's precisely the bits they needed to track to see that their routing was completely and totally wrong. So the problem will apparently never be fixed, at least until an Apple employee happens to want to visit a friend who lives in the Enclave at Prestonwood and realizes they can't get there.
So I've switched to Google Maps, and I loathe the lack of privacy, but I love the sharing option, so I guess I'm staying, even though I live elsewhere now.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
If privacy is worth something to you, it’s clearly better than Google. Is it? Has everyone forgotten the Yelp tracking beacon? Good thing Apple relies on Yelp for business info and has pretty deep Yelp integration with the mobile app.
You don't ever have to install Yelp to use it within Apple Maps. The app does not come on the iPhone by default. By default it opens the Yelp website (which of course nags you to get their app and/or login, but that's not unique to Yelp). I suspect that all the news articles reporting on this issue are probably greatly misunderstanding how technology works. > And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a…
> By default it opens the Yelp website (which of course nags you to get their app and/or login, but that's not unique to Yelp).
A bit of a sidenote, but the worst part is that now Yelp doesn't just nag you to get the app and/or login. It displays the nag splash page and doesn't let you see any information at all until you install the app and/or login.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bike routes with offline maps would be a nice addition as well...
OsmAnd does that :-)
Works pretty well in areas that have good OSM coverage as well, and it can intelligently follow gpx tracks. The only thing I miss about it is no Apple Watch integration.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#150I was a big defender of Apple Maps, largely because I almost never saw any problems with the data. Then I moved into an apartment complex in which Apple had the driveway in the wrong place. I've moved since, so I'll spell it out: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=5940+Arapaho+Rd%2C+75248&t=osx&ia=... Apple Maps believes that the driveways are to the south and east, but in fact the front driveway--the main entrance--is to the…
Convenience and privacy are on a spectrum. More of one means less of the other.