I look at this and can't believe Apple wanted to ship with this. And I mean that literally, not incredulously. I believe Apple wants to be in carol of its mapping future, but this product isn't ready yet, and I don't think Apple is so delusional to not be able to see that. So that makes me wonder what happened in contract negotiations with Google to force it out. Did Google flat-out say "No"? Seems unlikely. Was it j…
I couldn't care less about what Apple was thinking before they released this. What matters is that they pushed out a living, breathing UX fuck-up of an application to millions of people that depended on it to get around.
It seems like the quality level maintained by Steve Jobs is quickly deteriorating in favour of business moves designed to wrest more control off Google. They are operating in a very similar way to other companies now. Google executives must be laughing very hard right now. If I was Google I'd avoid releasing a Google Maps application for at least a year and let the Android handset manufacturers ruthlessly exploit And…
And you came to this conclusion based on one bad app? Quite the leap it seems. What's missing in all of these conversations is that Apple's contract with Google for mapping ended this year. No one knows what really happened for Apple to make this change.
Apologies, I wasn't trying to represent what I said as fact hence the word "seems". However, I do feel that this has been a very lacklustre update from Apple...
I think it would have been worthwhile to keep the contract with Google (even if it's expensive) while investing in making a better Apple Maps app.
To be honest, despite its flaws, it's going to be ok for most of the people, most of the time. Navigation is going to be a big boon. Using it I haven't noticed major differences personally. Some restaurants are in the wrong location, but on the flip side I like the yelp reviews. I'm sure they will improve on the areas that are flawed.
Thinking that a maps app without transit and biking directions is "good enough", even if the driving and walking directions were accurate, betrays an extreme bias and disconnect with the way a lot of the world gets around. For Apple's set of rich customers in the U.S., yeah, maybe driving and walking are good enough. But "most of the people" is a huge overstatement.
Uhh...Apple has plenty of customers in metro areas like the Bay Area or New York, Tokyo, etc. that rely heavily on public transit (I'm one of them). There are plenty of reasons to hate on Apple but stupid populist rage is not one of them.
Directions being ok most for most people, most of the time, is hardly acceptable. Google Maps had a tendency to drop pins for locations on the wrong spot. That meant I always had to confirm the location with street view, 100% of the time. Going to the wrong spot can be catastrophic in some instances (wrong or non existent hospital.) In others it can be really bad (missing a critical meeting, walking in during a weddi…
> If Apple's management thinks its acceptable to roll out > beta products on all of their users, I'll be moving to > Android. Sure - because Google never rolls out beta products on all of their users...
A good point for sure.
I think his reasoning is that, if all the options are going to be beta-level products, he might as well use Android. I think Apple has always implicitly presented a deal where they tightly control their phone, but the experience is excellent. You don't care who makes the maps app because it "just works." If that's changing, users might be happier in an ecosystem where choice is more pervasive.
The "roller coaster" effects in the 3-d view are my favorite. They've got some smoothing algorithm going, or it wouldn't curve the way it does, but the elevation data must not have a high enough resolution. Google has made this sort of thing look so easy for so long, but it's clearly very hard to get this stuff right. So, I guess it's not that surprising that apple messed up something incredibly hard in their first a…
There are lot of privacy problems with essentially having every iphone phone home with where it is all the time.
I'd wager that the phone sends back "areas" rather than GPS coordinates. So rather than the phone reporting "My owner was at (lat,long) at 3:21PM!" it would instead report "My owner came within range of Starbucks' Wifi Hotspot at 3:19PM, and left at 3:23PM!" In reality Apple has been doing exactly this type of thing since iOS 4 was deployed[1], so unfortunately the privacy problems are apparently very easy to sideste…
Weren't they going to use user locations in their traffic update service?
Openstreetmap's doesnt address any of the OP's issues. Having built maps for the past 12 years, I know exactly what of each of those issues are about. The blurry images are underlying base layers that drew first and then probably the upper layer timed out when rendering the tile. The curves are caused by elevation measurements that are incorrect (measuring elevation from a satellite involves bouncing from the ground…
Apple will have something much better in one year It certainly will be better but I'm not holding my breath about Apple maps surpassing Google Maps any time soon. Google bought a Rasmussen brothers' company (what eventually became Google Maps) in 2004. That's eight years of product development, data collection, storage and refining -- all at Google's pace. Will Apple find some shortcut to compress this time in one-tw…
It wasn't until about 3 years ago that Google Maps became the polished app that it is now, ie: vector maps, 3d building maps, tilting, etc. (Google has been in the map business for 10 years now?) Apple has a lot of catching up to do but it's very good at trudging ahead regardless of customers complaints until the product is completely polished and competitive.
It seems like the quality level maintained by Steve Jobs is quickly deteriorating in favour of business moves designed to wrest more control off Google. They are operating in a very similar way to other companies now. Google executives must be laughing very hard right now. If I was Google I'd avoid releasing a Google Maps application for at least a year and let the Android handset manufacturers ruthlessly exploit And…
And you came to this conclusion based on one bad app? Quite the leap it seems. What's missing in all of these conversations is that Apple's contract with Google for mapping ended this year. No one knows what really happened for Apple to make this change.
And you came to this conclusion based on one bad app? Quite the leap it seems.
This isn't about "one bad app," it's about a core smartphone app that everybody uses. That's why so many people are complaining and the story is kicking off all over the place.
It seems like the quality level maintained by Steve Jobs is quickly deteriorating in favour of business moves designed to wrest more control off Google. They are operating in a very similar way to other companies now. Google executives must be laughing very hard right now. If I was Google I'd avoid releasing a Google Maps application for at least a year and let the Android handset manufacturers ruthlessly exploit And…
Yeah. Maps is one of the most important smartphone apps. They might have just handed the market to Droid.