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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 brow…
What's worse for consumers in the end though? 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 ha…
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.