Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outside of niche cases, every user I've ever talked to, here or in-person, has only ever used brand loyalty as their reason for using it. With a userbase like that, why bother making a good service, particularly when you don't have the institutional competency to do so?
Okay, in a comment you left literally three minutes before this you were accusing someone else of being "stuck in a 2010 Apple vs Google fanboy-war view of the world," and now you're saying, in so many words, only people who are fanboys use Apple maps because Apple fans are sheep so why should Apple bother. Pick a lane.
> you're saying, in so many words, only people who are fanboys use Apple maps because Apple fans are sheep so why should Apple bother.
This is a reasonable interpretation if you read my comment carelessly, because I was pretty imprecise with my phrasing.
First off, I don't think my sample is close to representative of all users, but I've come across it often enough in diverse enough contexts that I'm comfortable considering brand-loyalty-as-motivation to be a non-trivial part of the market dynamic here.
I'm also not artificially deducing brand loyalty from assumptions about the quality of the product, and I recognize that its most famous failings don't encapsulate overall product quality (in fact, I didn't make any direct claims about product quality). The "brand-loyal" people I'm referring to are the ones who've explicitly said to me that they use Apple Maps so that it can "get more user data and get better". This kind of altruism is vanishingly rare in most product relationships, and brand loyalty is by far the most parsimonious explanation. This shouldn't be surprising; theres a reason that Apple's marketing and product competencies are world-renowned, and I have plenty of other from-the-horse's-mouth examples (like the family members who sincerely ask me why I'd choose an Android, as they had _literally_ never heard a reason other than "can't afford an iPhone").
Apple's relatively poor competency at services (vs hardware products) is a subjective claim, but one that isn't an unreasonable conclusion for a thoughtful person to land on (or disagree with).
To put it all together, something like this more accurately conveys my point:
I have enough data points of strong brand loyalty shaping Apple consumer behavior, particularly in the case of Maps, that I fairly consider it a non-trivial factor in usage of the product. I don't discount (and in fact directly call out) the possibility of the app fitting a specific consumer better, nor do I claim that it's not a better product overall, as I'm not familiar enough with it to make that claim. A situation with stickier brand loyalty _requires_ less competition on usability than the counterfactual (this is practically tautological).
If you can't see the difference between the above and the trivially-disprovable factual claims in the comment I described, then your definition of "fanboy" seems to be little more than "dislike a product I like".