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A decade after a disastrous launch, is Apple Maps finally good?
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Technology
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Frustratingly, the two are good at different things.
Apple Maps is mostly better at announcing driving routes. Routing quality is similar - they provide different, but similar-quality routes. Public transport routes are superior because - shockingly - they seem to have more accurate data than Google Maps. Google Maps is still superior in the specific location of a business within a narrow area. Apple Maps has more errors where the marker is on the building, but Google Maps has it at the entrance.
At the same time, local search is terrible. Their partners’ and their proprietary data is inadequate and it seems businesses don’t know they could/should care and don’t maintain listings. I’ve submitted several changes in my local area and while they are usually accepted, some of them ended up reverted a while later. They seem to be working on this and hopefully they’ll eventually catch up - but I’m not sure how, if businesses don’t maintain their listings!
Ironically, my home address is more consistent in Apple Maps than Google Maps. There are multiple accepted spellings of my street name, and which one you use with my house number yields a different location on my street in Google maps. Apple Maps always gives the correct location.
It's a problem when I order food to be delivered because sometimes their system will auto correct the address I provide to one of the spellings that Google Maps thinks is way down the street from where I actually live.
Do we live on the same street? I have the exact same issue with Google vs Apple maps
Here in Norway they had a solid regression last year.
I mean in some areas the maps are about as accurate as your 2004 sat-nav, if you ever had one.
Roads that where there are missing, outlines are suddenly grossly imprecise.
Find my shows meaningless address information with a random number at the end.
Honestly have no idea wtf is going on.
Probably one of the European mapping companies demanded more money than Apple was willing to pay. Report all the problems, they'll get fixed one by one. Apple will also detect problems automatically by comparing traffic data collection to their map.
Have seen zero improvements after the regression, but I think you overestimate people’s willingness to help improve something that has worse data quality than open street map.
If it’s broken and I have a better alternative I’m not using it.
Ugh that sucks. That really shouldn’t happen