Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On the Timing of Apple’s Map Switch

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 58 posts

Re: On the Timing of Apple’s Map Switch

#31

Post by nivloc »

zmmmmm wrote: post #9

Problem with this analysis is that if the replacing maps on iOS6 was always going to be this year then it just compounds the culpability of Apple for shipping it half baked with no fallback. ie. in trying to assuage the criticism of Apple for shipping maps too early (what I read as the main point of his piece here), Gruber only begs the question of why they weren't better prepared for it.

Maps are hard.

The original Google Maps was pretty bad. Mapquest beat it much of the time. There was one road in my hometown, and none in many countries.

Google devoted enormous resources to acquiring data (petabytes worth), processing it, correcting it, to give us the product we have today.

Even though Apple acquired some neat companies that made data look good, they obviously underestimated how much data was required to make it useful. No amount of QC could have prepared them, frankly.

The upside is that Google has been fairly closed with their map products. They're miles ahead of Apple, who will need every partner they can find to close the gap. Hopefully it will give the data providers a bit of leverage to get refinements back out so it can be used in endeavours other than showing where the nearest pizza joint is.

Re: On the Timing of Apple’s Map Switch

#32

Post by zaphar »

This still doesn't explain why they didn't ship it in iOS7 then. If it wasn't ready and they only want to ship such things in major versions then hold it till the next major version. It wasn't ready. And bug reports aren't the solution to get it ready either. They needed better expertise and better quality data to start with.

Re: On the Timing of Apple’s Map Switch

#33

Post by guywithabike »

mcantelon wrote: post #28
ghshephard wrote: post #17

This is one of those articles, that after you read it, you face palm, and go, "Of course." I feel stupid not having come to the same assessment after hearing about when the dates were set.

What he doesn't answer is why they chose to ship a half-backed map implementation rather than continue to pay licensing fees until they got it right. It's not like Apple's starving for cash.

> rather than continue to pay licensing fees until they got it right

It's not like you just buy the data at Wal-Mart -- you have to negotiate licensing terms with Google and the terms that Google wanted were, reportedly, onerous.

Re: On the Timing of Apple’s Map Switch

#34

Post by Steko »

zaphar wrote: post #32

This still doesn't explain why they didn't ship it in iOS7 then. If it wasn't ready and they only want to ship such things in major versions then hold it till the next major version. It wasn't ready. And bug reports aren't the solution to get it ready either. They needed better expertise and better quality data to start with.

How does it not explain it? Maps deal expires 6/13; iOS 7.0 launches 9/13. What do you ship from 6/13 to 9/13?

Re: On the Timing of Apple’s Map Switch

#35

Post by lacker »

arpit wrote: post #2

I dont get why Maps releases are tied to OS releases. If the Maps api to other apps doesn't change, why can't maps be updated as other apps are?

Map data will certainly be updated constantly, not even requiring an update to the app. Any time there's a road closure or the map changes in some way, it needs to be reflected live. So I wouldn't be surprised if other aspects of the map are updated server-side as well.

Re: On the Timing of Apple’s Map Switch

#36

Post by arrrg »

Ok, can someone help me? I’m quite confused. Apple’s maps have undeniable problems. Pretty big ones in some cases.

But are they really unusable? From my perspective it seems as though Apple’s maps are merely inferior, not unusable. Some aspects are even better than they were before (on iOS), some (very few) are better than Google Maps (traffic info in Germany is quite impressive).

Everyone here seems to take it as self-evident that the maps are unusable. I don’t get that. To me it looks like a slight (again, depending on use case) regression in the short term.

I also don’t get the deification of Google Maps. I remember they weren’t that great in Germany only two or so years ago. I still encounter mistakes regularly. Google Maps are awesome despite those flaws.

Re: On the Timing of Apple’s Map Switch

#37

Post by nivloc »

mcantelon wrote: post #28
ghshephard wrote: post #17

This is one of those articles, that after you read it, you face palm, and go, "Of course." I feel stupid not having come to the same assessment after hearing about when the dates were set.

What he doesn't answer is why they chose to ship a half-backed map implementation rather than continue to pay licensing fees until they got it right. It's not like Apple's starving for cash.

That's pretty much what the entire article is about, no?

Re: On the Timing of Apple’s Map Switch

#38

Post by CamperBob2 »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #23
ryanb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His main suggestion is that Apple couldn't get enough data to make it good without launching the app, and they had to go ahead and release it at some point. The software works quite well - it's the dataset that's inferior.

They could've tried licensing far better map data from Navteq/Nokia like Amazon recently did for the Kindles by using some of their 100 billion dollar stash. Amazon did not try to roll out its own maps with half baked data. Whether Nokia would have been willing to license to Apple is a different question.

Or they could have tried not bringing a water gun to a thermonuclear war.
Post reply on HN