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The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

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Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#331

Post by angryasian »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #290
angryasian wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and Google had an agreement in place. It was apple that chose not to continue this agreement. Speculation: I find it hard to believe from a business perspective that Google would want to do anything to harm this relationship as the map and map search provider on the ios platform. Being the default service for maps on ios is a win for google. Even if they release an app at this point, they aren't the default whi…

It was apple that chose not to continue this agreement. Do you have evidence of this? I find the history of this fascinating and have my own theories (that I've posted elsewhere), but this is a pretty definitive statement that isn't the way I imagined things going down.

from a business standpoint. Google would be the #1 search for browser and places/location on the top two mobile platforms globally equaling to over 90% of the smartphone searches. What possible reason would there be for google to not want to be the default places/location search on the ios platform ?

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#332

Post by philwelch »

underwater wrote: post #272
taligent wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not forced to upgrade to iOS6 nor is Apple blocking Google Maps on the browser.

I upgraded to iOS6 to get the turn-by-turn navigation. Now I discover that only iPhone 4S and 5 devices get voice guidance. There is no way I can get Google Maps back without jailbreaking my phone. The voice limitation appears to be simply planned obsolescence; Waze can handle it without issues. This is a slap in the face to someone who paid a lot of money to Apple for a current-generation phone a little over a year…

> There is no way I can get Google Maps back without jailbreaking my phone.

You can't restore from a pre-upgrade backup?

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#333

Post by angryasian »

kemayo wrote: post #273
toyg wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the simplest explanation is that Apple and Google could not come to terms on the price for access Yeah, it's not like Apple is sitting on a mountain of cash right now! Oh wait...

"I have a lot of money" doesn't translate to "I should make bad business deals". If nothing else, it's certainly possible that writing their own maps app and taking the initial PR/UX hit of "it's not as good as Google's yet" was the only reasonable option available to them. (Not that we have any idea.)

for a company that makes the claim of not compromising on the user experience. They have taken sacrifices in the past to ensure a better user experience. Its not out of character if they did have to spend more money for a year till they got out maps perfectly

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#334

Post by caycep »

LnxPrgr3 wrote: post #323
Maascamp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Apple gets a pass here. If they are forcing users onto their product it had better be competitive, no matter how hard it is. Microsoft got so such pass with WP7 and that was an entirely new OS/platform!

Anyone here actually used this version of Maps to find someplace yet? Not just to break it and point and laugh, but to actually use it? I can only see 3D maps as a gimmick, so I can't bring myself to care too much that it's broken. I'm slightly surprised that feature shipped in that state, but meh. What I care about: can it get me where I'm going? It's 2012 and I've still found nothing that can do that without occasi…

It works most of the time. Especially for businesses, as I think it accesses the yelp directory. If it gets point a and b correct, the routing seems ok.

Most errors seem to be that of string parsing - the biggest sin is not recognizing town/state portions of search strings consistently.

Ironic since I'd bet some of the best language parsing people are busy working on llvm and clang somewhere else on apple campus.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#335

Post by othermaciej »

cooldeal wrote: post #235
eddieplan9 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also reminded me of Apple cutting off Internet Explorer for Mac[1] and went with building Safari. See how that worked out for them (and all devices relying on WebKit). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac

True, but Safari was based on KHTML which was being worked on for a long time and was pretty comparable(and even in some cases better) than Firefox and IE at the time. Can you say the same about iOS 6 maps and Google Maps?

Speaking as one of the people who worked on adapting khtml into Wbkit, no, it was no comparable with Mozilla or IE at the time. It took a major effort to get to shippable performance, web comparability, standards compliance, and quality. Check out the first 2 or 3 years of WebKit commits on trac.webkit.org and you will see some incredibly basic stuff.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#336

Post by Tichy »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #288
Tichy wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now it is Google's fault that Apple ships a crappy maps app? Sorry, I think Apple just were too full of themselves, and they were greedy at the expense of their customers. As for the other story - sure, if Apple had demanded that the Google Maps app shows Apple Ads, not Google Ads, or that they get a share of the Ad revenue, then Google would walk away eventually. Obviously it is also worth something for Google to…

Why should it have been different with a Google maps app shipping with iOS? Because the world of business development is very different from the world of consumer APIs. In a bizdev world, you want SLAs and contractually understood definitions of how both sides will behave. A company like Apple (or Google, Oracle, Microsoft, etc) isn't going to build a core feature of its product on somebody else's technology without…

Is there any indication, anywhere, that Apple had to pay Google for the maps app? Quotations, citations? I really really doubt it, if anything I would expect Apple received money from Google for the privilege of being the preinstalled maps app.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#337

Post by robryan »

devcpp wrote: post #275
snogglethorpe wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also don't expect Apple to approve any Google "maps" application any time soon either given how strategic it is for their mobile business. Soooo, their users don't matter? "Business strategy" is more important? This is Apple?!

You know, I'm starting to miss Steve Jobs. He was a businessman as well, but he also knew how to treat his customers right, because keeping the customers in the hype is extremely important in his high-benefits scheme. I don't think he would have let that kind of stuff happen. He would have paid the price: it's not like Apple can't afford Google Maps for another version of two of the iPhone, and now some customers are…

Not so sure about that. I tend to think he would have been less likely to put this new maps out though. Perhaps paid Google for a bit longer until the Apple maps were real competition.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#338

Post by ehamberg »

Aloisius wrote: post #65

Since Apple doesn't have a website for their maps, just knowing what is broken is going to be a problem for them. I wonder if they will put in a map editor in their next version to crowd source fixes or at least bug reports.

It already has that, to some extent.

When you click somewhere, one of the options you get is “Report a Problem” which lets you say that something is missing or indicate where a point of interest _should_ be by placing a pin.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#339

Post by kalleboo »

laacz wrote: post #231

What actually bothers me the most, is poor quality of iOS6. It has several bugs (excluding maps and unfortunate wifi bug), which already have affected me and users around me. Some most notable include following. * Sometimes iTunes update screen does not refresh, * You can't disable vibration for notifications per application (i love my email in notification center, still - i do not need it to vibrate; in 5.1 it worke…

Apple's 1.0 release are always kind of buggy. I remember iOS 5.0 was really buggy, and OS X 10.X.0 releases are notorious.

Re: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

#340

Post by grey-area »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #280
grey-area wrote: post #2

What confuses me about Apple's choice of maps here is why they didn't go with OpenStreetMap? It was the perfect opportunity to leapfrog Google and help the open source community at the same time, and they would have had more control over the data - as it is they are beholden to TomTom and other providers to try to get things fixed, or will have to try to merge future map updates with their own patches. As it is they…

OSM is only comparable to commercial data in Europe AFAIK, and there, only in some places. It's not surprising that densely populated areas in Europe/UK are complete and accurate in OSM.

It's actually pretty good in some quite remote places, but like all mapping the coverage does vary (see examples elsewhere in this thread of remote places). Probably some countries they'd have to either fill in with commercial data, or sponsor efforts to add data to OSM.

The main advantage would be that OSM has all the adding/editing/updating stuff down - that is a major operation and if Apple are trying to do it all themselves while merging inconsistent data from several sources and taking care of customer complaints they'll find themselves falling farther and farther behind people like Google who have devoted years and years of effort and a lot of money to this just to get where they are now.

Perhaps Apple considered OSM as a basis and decided it was just too limited in areas that were important to them - it would be fascinating to find out about their internal tools for this and where the data came from but I suppose we'll never know.

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