Nick Jesdanun, writing for the Associated Press:
Apple Maps quickly became the butt of jokes when it debuted in 2012. It overlooked many towns and businesses and misplaced famous landmarks. It marked New York’s Madison Square Garden arena as park space because of the word “Garden.” The service was a rare blunder for a company known for simple, easy-to-use products.
It’s a different story three years later.
Apple fixed errors as users submitted them. It quietly bought several mapping companies, mostly for their engineers and other talent. This fall, it added transit directions for several major cities, narrowing a major gap with Google. Apple Maps is now used more widely than Google Maps on iPhones.
Great success story for the Apple Maps team. Kudos.
Here in Canada, Google Maps remains vastly superior. Apple Maps fails often with the smallest spelling mistakes in names of streets or places. Often, Google understands multiple variations of the name of a place while Apple Maps only recognizes one.
I’ve lived in three different states in the past year and Apple Maps is still unreliable as heck. Wherever they buy their database from is horribly out of date. It’s better than nothing, and worlds better than it was in 2012, but I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest it’s better than Google Maps.
Note to Apple Music bashers….patience, grasshopper. Personally, I get on just fine with it, but I don’t have a 25,000 iTunes library of music.
This is the power of the (low quality) default and nothing more. I live in the SF Bay Area, Apple’s own backyard, and it is still terrible in comparison to Google Maps and Waze.
Absolutely not true of Canada as a whole. Google Maps doesn’t even know the boundaries of the city I live in, and has street labels crossed everywhere.
I live in Canada too, eh? Up until recently I found Apple Maps had a couple of major bugs which kept it unusable. Suddenly it has started working. It locates me properly all the time and it finds business/locations well – sometimes better than Google Maps.
It’s like it suddenly clicked.
If you’re driving in the US, then you need Waze. A specialized app that does one thing really well. Outside of the US it’s kind of pointless since no one uses it.
I rarely do business by name searches, instead mostly relying on addresses. Are you saying businesses by name is working lately? That’s pretty cool.
I’ve mostly settled on Apple Maps for their (in my area) vastly superior routing. 🙂
Last week I asked Siri to take me to Midori (a local sushi place downtown Calgary) and it helpfully pointed me to a place in France.
Apple really needs to make search more context/location aware in general.
Yup, business names just started working for me. Last weekend found a tile place, Vietnamese Pho place, Lee Valley, and second hand tool shop. Two months ago it would have been a nightmare.
A running joke on Vancouver Island is the Empress Hotel which is a landmark. Works just fine in Apple Maps but Google Maps points you to a really dodgy hotel in Vancouver. You have to type ‘Fairmont Empress Hotel’ to make it work but no one on the planet calls it that.
Interesting. I live in New England and when I searched for Midori, a place in NJ came up as well as a few places in CA.
I had to actually type in France. Once I did, it kept suggesting it.
I think Apple Maps biggest problem is knowing your current location.
First approximation for location is based on cell tower triangulation, and there’s no excuse for a lack of accuracy there.
If I’m not on WiFi and I pull my phone out of my pocket and just ask “What’s the weather like?” there seems to be about a 5% chance I’ll get an answer for Toronto. (I’m near Vancouver, which for those unfamiliar is almost the width of North America away at over 4,000km.) Likewise, “directions to Costco” might send me to one in Toronto. I laugh, ask again, and by that time my phone has figured out where I am.
I think that’s just a bad cell phone tower database, but I don’t know who’s responsible for that. My guess is it’s own Rogers.
It’s the default mapping app. Being #1 isn’t an accomplishment in this context. And compared to Google Maps, it’s still terrible. Doesn’t redirect when traffic gets bad, the search is still very poor, and doesn’t show you which lane to be in to prepare for a turn.
“Apple Maps is now used more widely than Google Maps on iPhones.”
Because it is launched automatically from Mail, Siri and Safari and other apps as the default map. The question is, if the user initiates a map from their home screen, how many choose Apple Maps over Google? How many people close Apple Maps when it is opened by default and go to Google Maps or Waze?
Local information gaps aside, all it’s missing is Street View.
Good news, last week is a long time ago. I just told Siri “give me directions to Midori in Calgary” and I am right now looking at driving directions from my front door to 1054 17th Avenue SW.
I think the key is to specify the city! (But why the heck should I tell my GPS-enabled phone which city I’m in?)