I use Waze because I want to know where the cops are.
How reliable is that?
Apple Maps vs. Google Maps
121–130 of 247 posts
Re: Apple Maps vs. Google Maps
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good for you one mega-city in Europe* got proper apple treatment after 10 years lets wait 20 more years for other monster cities, and then they can maybe add some cities under a 10 million population :D
What’s the other option? Google is the only internet map ever? Or no other internet map can ever release anything until they have perfect global coverage?
I don’t think Apple needs perfect coverage, just more than “parts of the USA and 10 major cities worldwide”.
Re: Apple Maps vs. Google Maps
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenStreetMap >>>>>>>>> Google maps pretty much everywhere in EU (and RoW). I had better data in Harz, Bohemian Switzerland, Girona, Laos, Indian jungles etc which was way better than what Google provides. I would rather give my data to the qualitatively better option OSM than a controversial foreign firm that has questionable stance on user privacy.
Really? In my experience (Europe, mostly France/Italy), OpenStreetMap has a lot more details than Google on “long-term features”: roads, (hiking) paths, public toilets and fountains, etc; while Google is a lot better for POIs and restaurants/bars/museums/etc. On a given street, OSM will have the exact position of every tree but not so much about restaurants, while with GM you get their opening hours, ratings, menus,…
In brand new neighbourhoods, I've also found OSM much better than Google Maps. E.g., lots of new developments in Cambridge were extremely well annotated whereas Google Maps didn't even have streetnames. This is super helpful when you are shopping for a new property.
Re: Apple Maps vs. Google Maps
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, the data on Apple Maps is just not good enough here. The opening hours are frequently just wrong and can’t be trusted. Part of the reason for that is they use Yelp as a data source which is pretty much non-existent here. If I look at a popular local restaurant on Apple Maps (one which has thousands of reviews on both Google and TripAdvisor) then the opening hours are just wrong and seemingly pulled from Yelp wh…
That's what many don't realize. Apple shows really fantastic and detailed 3D handcrafted maps each year at WWDC, then when you dig deeper, you find out that it's only for like 3 American cities and it's coming in a year... Basically useless for 99% of people. While Maps also has some discrepancies between cities and also different countries, in general it's a lot more consistent and features roll out more widely.
You make it sound like Apple's efforts stop after announcing at WWDC. They do seem to be following through. The "new maps" were announced in 2018. They finished the continental US in January 2020 and since expanded to Canada, UK, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy with the most previous update released last month.
Justin O'Beirne has followed Google/Apple maps in detail for years https://www.justinobeirne.com/
Forbes is an American business magazine and the author covers cover security and surveillance. So I wouldn't think his advice is meant for everyone.
Re: Apple Maps vs. Google Maps
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about OSM?
What is a good iOS app for turn-by-turn directions (driving, biking, walking, public transit) that uses OpenStreetMap data?
Organic Maps is IMHO the most usable OSM app for Android. It's available also for iOS, no idea if it's 1-to-1 but worth giving it a try.
Re: Apple Maps vs. Google Maps
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mostly fine. But I can't trust it to be up-to-date for business locations and opening hours. Some places (even high-traffic places like McDonalds) are missing, some closed places haven't been removed after months (years?), and opening hours are just as broken. I'll always double check with a Google search. It's been fine for public transport and driving navigation.
Business information in Apple Maps -- at least in the US -- comes from Yelp. I haven't really had the experiences you're describing, but I live in northern California, where Yelp seems to be pretty up-to-date most of the time. (With a caveat that it's been worse in 2020, but I suppose that's not unexpected for a crowdsourced directory during a year most of the crowd wasn't going out.)
I don't know if that's entirely true. I wouldn't say I lean on business hours in the app often, but things have gotten weird with Covid. In the last month I found a bunch of hours wrong in both Yelp and Apple Maps--they each had different wrong hours listed. Maybe Apple pulls from Yelp monthly or quarterly? Maybe Apple populated their own database years ago and maintain it separately? Whatever the method they each have their own way for users to report incorrect hours.
Re: Apple Maps vs. Google Maps
#127I’m curious - does anyone reading this agree with the notion that Apple maps is becoming comparable to Google maps? I haven’t given it a fair shot in almost a decade I guess, and it was almost unusable then. Does anyone here use it as a daily driver? What are the strong and weak points?
One thing that really winds me up is that the colour scheme in google maps is ‘wrong’ in the sense that it does not match existing local maps. Apple maps have put a lot of effort into making the colour scheme and labels match existing maps. At least where I live in the uk.
Motorways show up in blue with white-on-blue-rounded-rectangle labels (matching road signs) with A-roads in green. Junction numbers show up as white-in-black-rounded-rectangle like on road signs. On google maps, the motorways and A-roads are yellow. Motorways get blue labels but it’s the wrong shade and shape. A-road labels are slightly better. A failure of apple maps is that they don’t show junction numbers on the regular maps while google does. But their maps mostly look like the road atlases I remember.
If I look at public transport, apple have made a much better attempt to match the look of underground maps in London (failure example: the map doesn’t make it obvious that the jubilee line stops at green park.) Google maps don’t get such good results though they try to match colours of lines. Google maps don’t have national rail but apple do. If I look at New York, apple have tried to capture the different style of their metro network (also their American road labels look like the road signs and this seems less the case for google but I don’t know so much about US road signs.)
The feature I really wish for, especially in car play, is plan views of road junctions like roundabouts or weird intersections. Neither maps app does this.
Re: Apple Maps vs. Google Maps
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think succumbing to defeatism is the correct response to the gross privacy invasion. Take the victories where you can, and fight who you can.
I don’t see how voluntarily letting a service see your location is an invasion of privacy.
I don’t believe that was their point.
If someone chooses to be privacy focused, then they will likely opt out of the things that they can control - that doesn’t change because there are others they can’t.
Re: Apple Maps vs. Google Maps
#129Apple's driving coverage has been improving and is now as good as Google's in the SF Bay area. Google is still better at walking directions (especially involving building access), and I'm sure their coverage is superior globally. Apple doesn't support multi-point itineraries and doesn't have depart at / arrive by functionality, which can be very useful. Apple has generally copied Google's mobile UI approach, which ha…
> Apple doesn't support multi-point itineraries
I've never tried multi-point itineraries with Google Maps, but the new iOS beta has an "add stop" feature. It's not exactly what I was hoping for because it only has predefined searches ("food", "gas", etc). What it does is pause your original trip with a button to continue. If it could do a generic search along the route it would be exactly what I need most of the time without being too confusing to use.
Re: Apple Maps vs. Google Maps
#130I use Waze because I want to know where the cops are.
How reliable is that?
It's been fairly reliable in practice, but it's based on crowd sourcing. It'll ask you to confirm if you see one someone else has flagged. Sometimes you're the first to see it, sometimes the alert is out of date and there's no officer.