7 ms·

Apple Maps has been down for hours, users unable to search for places/directions

63 points by el_duderino 8y ago

nerpderp83 8y ago
People are safer with Apple Maps being down. Probably intentional.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  No kidding! Last time I used it was to navigate to the Chicago Botanical Gardens. Apple Maps told me I had arrived while I was still in the middle of the freeway. Went back to Google Maps from there.
  - cozzyd 8y ago
    Technically you had! Oh you wanted the main entrance?
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  I started using Apple Maps when I bought my new car which has CarPlay. (You currently can't use other nav apps with CarPlay, but you will be able to with iOS 12.) I was pleasantly surprised. The UI is slick, there are no ads, it does traffic-based redirection, lane guidance (something Waze still doesn't do), lane closure warnings - it's pretty good. I guess the usual criticism is that the maps are inaccurate but it's really improved over the past year or two. I think the knee-jerk complaints are from people who haven't used it recently. I appreciate that it's the only major nav app that doesn't constantly record my position in the cloud.
  - SippinLean 8y ago
    >I appreciate that it's the only major nav app that doesn't constantly record my position in the cloud. What do you mean? It certainly stores your location history, albeit it's not as precise as Google Maps.
    - LeoPanthera 8y ago
      Your location history is stored on the device and never uploaded.
      - mentat 8y ago
        You're telling me that it pulls maps without tell Apple where it is? If it tells Apple where it is, then the location history exists, almost certainly at least for fraud / security uses.
        toasterlovin 8y ago
        Yeah, Apple needs a start and end to create the route, but they don't need to store your location on their servers to do that.
        LeoPanthera 8y ago
        You misread what I said. Obviously your phone has to tell Apple where it is, but Apple does not record that information after the fact.
        eridius 8y ago
        I believe all requests made to the Apple Maps service does the same thing Siri requests do and cycle through brand new unique identifiers every 15 minutes, making it so Apple can’t identify requests made over more than a few minutes as coming from the same device (and it includes no other identifying information).
        baddox 8y ago
        Not that I’m concerned about this “vulnerability,” but surely for navigation trips longer than 15 minutes it would be easy to correlate requests to a single user, given that each request probably needs to include the origin and destination and those are probably unique to one user at any given time.
  - wenc 8y ago
    I used it recently and the maps continue to be inaccurate in the New England states. I'm so glad CarPlay is supporting other mapping apps in iOS 12.
    - optimuspaul 8y ago
      inaccurate in what ways? I have found them to be fairly accurate in terms of roads and what not. Finding precise locations of addresses is hit or miss. Google and Bing have a huge head start there, but in my opinion are still full of inaccuracies. I have even found some things that google is just wrong but apple maps get it right. I'm obsessed with maps though, so I will spend hours comparing the results of google, apple and bing.
  - chrisjc 8y ago
    This might be the 'feature' that finally brings me to use an iphone instead of android. The lack of this kind of customization has kept me away from iOS until now.
  - tpush 8y ago
    A lot of those users complaining are probably not US based. For example, where I live in Germany Apple Maps for the most part doesn't even have transit, while Google Maps has had it since years. Or just recently I was looking for a supermarket which was supposedly very close to my location, so I looked it up on Apple Maps where the next one was. Told me it as 14km away. Turns out it was actually one street from where I was around a corner. Google Maps had the correct location. I prefer Apple Maps' UX, but their data is either outdated or just plain wrong at times, which makes it effectively useless for a lot of things I now use Google Maps for.
    - DavideNL 8y ago
      100% agree. I'm in the Netherlands (Europe, next to Germany) and live in a city with a population of ~120000 people. I often don't find places in Apple Maps, even in the middle of the city. Google Maps just finds everything. Recently, they build a few new roads which Apple Maps didn't know about (Google maps recognised it very early), so they keep sending people in the wrong direction. After about 3 months i got so annoyed that i sent feedback to Apple Maps to have it added which took me like half an hour to get through the process of adding/feedback. The sad thing is, the reason why Apple Maps is worse, is probably because they respect peoples privacy. Unlike Google, who follows android phones everywhere (1), and thus has more data, and better maps. 1) "Google has been tracking Android users even with location services turned off": https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-track-android-users-location-services-turned-off-sim https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-tr...
  - kurthr 8y ago
    I used it very recently to get to two separate trail heads in Arizona. Both of them are used by hundreds of people a day and are otherwise well marked. Using Apple Maps I was both times led to dead-end dirt roads or Posted (trespass) private property gates that were miles from the correct location. Had I been hiking, it would have been quite unsafe. I will not, with any alternative, use it again. In one case it was a 15min drive to the correct location on the other side of a mesa, which popped up on G-Maps immediately (the other was only a few miles away, but through ranch property).
  - vajrabum 8y ago
    Apple maps has some good features I use. It's great for finding your car in a big parking lot and it's integration with Open Table and Weather is also nice.
  - MBCook 8y ago
    The lane guidance is great, but sadly it was added in iOS 11. Other products have had it for years. Still, I’m a happy user of Apple Maps. I dislike Google Maps and am thrilled to have a quality alternative.
- bitL 8y ago
  I was once directed to a shortest albeit extremely steep route; once my car ended up on a slope with sliding front wheels I decided to return back :) (Tenerife, small roads around La Orotava towards Teide)
- mayniac 8y ago
  First time using Apple Maps last year on a business phone. Searched a (relatively generic) hotel I was trying to get to in France. The first match was in NYC. The one I was looking for, which was closest to me distance wise, was about fifth in the list. Location was on, Apple Maps knew where I was, but for some reason wasn't factoring in my location to my search. Gave it a few more chances but it kept doing the same thing. I'd put in McDonalds and it would give me a random McDonalds somewhere in America while I was looking for one in London. Decided if it was so badly developed that it can't search properly using an incredibly simple "pick the closest one to the user" criteria I'm not trusting it to navigate me when I'm walking, let alone driving.
selimthegrim 8y ago
In New Orleans, Apple Maps continues to give users extremely dangerous directions from BUS US 90 E to I 10 E that require cutting across two lanes of traffic in a few hundred feet when an alternate, safe ramp has been in place since 1989 (!). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontchartrain_Expressway#cite_note-T-P_3-8-89-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontchartrain_Expressway#cite_...
- scrooched_moose 8y ago
  When I was in Duluth, MN a few months back it told me "You have arrived at your destination" as I was driving 70 MPH down the interstate. The restaurant I was going to is above one of several tunnels under the city which hold I-35. Apple Maps assumed this meant the restaurant was actually on the shoulder of the interstate. Took me an extra 15 minutes to backtrack and get there on the correct surface roads. Immediately switched back to Google/Here https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pickwick+Restaurant+%26+Pub/@46.7914405,-92.0929837,278m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x52ae52c413e7142b:0x25055b614acd8e84!2sFitger's+Brewhouse+Brewery+and+Grille!8m2!3d46.792397!4d-92.090552!3m4!1s0x52ae52c6acd80545:0xdc4103d2542f598d!8m2!3d46.7916637!4d-92.0915115 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pickwick+Restaurant+%26+Pu...
  - rectang 8y ago
    This has happened to me with Google Maps, too. The destination was up a hill and over a ridge on a side street. "You have arrived!".
    - freehunter 8y ago
      This happened to an Uber driver when I was a passenger, too. He needed to get off the highway and then turn left, he got off the highway and Google Maps told him to make a u-turn, so he crossed the (paved) median and got onto the on-ramp. Once we passed the hotel, Google Maps told him to stop and let me out... still on the on-ramp. We had to turn off the mapping and turn on some common sense.
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
poulsbohemian 8y ago
Maybe a coincidence, but I noticed this week that without wifi enabled the location service has been particularly bad - at least four blocks difference. I generally leave wifi off and had never noticed that degree of accuracy prior to updating earlier this week.
- aetherson 8y ago
  It's a coincidence. Your raw location comes from GPS, cell towers, and (if it's on) wifi, not from the Apple Map's services.
  - microcolonel 8y ago
    > It's a coincidence. Your raw location comes from GPS, cell towers, and (if it's on) wifi, not from the Apple Map's services. IIRC Apple has their own wardriving database which makes the WiFi-based location services work, it's possible that was flushed and not refreshed from their services.
    - jacinda 8y ago
      I think your memory is accurate. When I've had WiFi turned off in the past I'll sometimes get a pop-up message on my iPhone suggesting turning WiFi to improve location accuracy.
    - aetherson 8y ago
      Yes, they do, but my parent was saying that his location was worse, with wifi off in the last week, than it was before, also with wifi off. Apple Maps being up and down won't affect your location accuracy if your wifi is off. (My parent was almost certainly incorrect. Having wifi off has always made location pretty bad on iPhones.)
LoSboccacc 8y ago
both of them will be mad
yalogin 8y ago
Kind of unfair but any thread about Maps turns into piling on the product rather than actually talking about the issue at hand. I thought Apple maps is actually quite good now. What would it take for that impression to go away?
- moojd 8y ago
  Anecdotally, it still can't navigate to my old apartment in ATL (a complex that has been there for decades.) There are also lots of rural areas I visit that Google Maps has no problem finding that Apple Maps cannot locate. There has yet to be a time that Google Maps failed to get me within a couple of lots of my destination while Apple Maps has been off by more than a mile multiple times.
  - optimuspaul 8y ago
    I was in Seattle a few weeks ago and Google Maps consistently had me 2 blocks north of my actual location, but Apple maps had me within 100 feet. I thought it was super interesting, but I didn't think too much about it at the time.
  - alasdair_ 8y ago
    Rather irritatingly, my house address seems to lead people to a random location two miles away when entered into google maps but the house next door works perfectly. It makes using Uber or any other google maps-based app particularly irritating and as-yes there is no fix after almost a year of reports. Open Street Maps works perfectly well, as does apple.
  - Posibyte 8y ago
    In my small town, we have a long street that's just a strip of restaurants. Google and Bing get it right, Apple Maps lists the entire mile-long strip as KFC's. If you select one, it's the same KFC. Been that way since launch. And not a huge deal, we're a tiny town, but it's just humorous and weird when others don't have that issue.
    - 8y ago
carapace 8y ago
> Whilst Apple’s system status reports no issues
Readywater 8y ago
I read this as “Users unable to reach places” and thought “That’s just apple maps.”
unstatusthequo 8y ago
They should sort that product out before venturing into the self driving car world
neduma 8y ago
there are lot of good materials here for comedy writing about maps apps.
jraph 8y ago
This could happen with any online service people rely on. For maps and directions, at least at some places, decent offline solutions exist and not relying on availability of a third party service and a good internet connection is helpful (and is probably better for privacy). Doing this for enough services also might be a way to lower energy consumption (?) and mobile bills.

63 points by el_duderino 8y ago

nerpderp83 8y ago

People are safer with Apple Maps being down. Probably intentional.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
godzillabrennus 8y ago
No kidding! Last time I used it was to navigate to the Chicago Botanical Gardens. Apple Maps told me I had arrived while I was still in the middle of the freeway. Went back to Google Maps from there.
- cozzyd 8y ago
  Technically you had! Oh you wanted the main entrance?
LeoPanthera 8y ago
I started using Apple Maps when I bought my new car which has CarPlay. (You currently can't use other nav apps with CarPlay, but you will be able to with iOS 12.) I was pleasantly surprised. The UI is slick, there are no ads, it does traffic-based redirection, lane guidance (something Waze still doesn't do), lane closure warnings - it's pretty good. I guess the usual criticism is that the maps are inaccurate but it's really improved over the past year or two. I think the knee-jerk complaints are from people who haven't used it recently. I appreciate that it's the only major nav app that doesn't constantly record my position in the cloud.
- SippinLean 8y ago
  >I appreciate that it's the only major nav app that doesn't constantly record my position in the cloud. What do you mean? It certainly stores your location history, albeit it's not as precise as Google Maps.
  - LeoPanthera 8y ago
    Your location history is stored on the device and never uploaded.
    - mentat 8y ago
      You're telling me that it pulls maps without tell Apple where it is? If it tells Apple where it is, then the location history exists, almost certainly at least for fraud / security uses.
      - toasterlovin 8y ago
        Yeah, Apple needs a start and end to create the route, but they don't need to store your location on their servers to do that.
      - LeoPanthera 8y ago
        You misread what I said. Obviously your phone has to tell Apple where it is, but Apple does not record that information after the fact.
      - eridius 8y ago
        I believe all requests made to the Apple Maps service does the same thing Siri requests do and cycle through brand new unique identifiers every 15 minutes, making it so Apple can’t identify requests made over more than a few minutes as coming from the same device (and it includes no other identifying information).
        baddox 8y ago
        Not that I’m concerned about this “vulnerability,” but surely for navigation trips longer than 15 minutes it would be easy to correlate requests to a single user, given that each request probably needs to include the origin and destination and those are probably unique to one user at any given time.
- wenc 8y ago
  I used it recently and the maps continue to be inaccurate in the New England states. I'm so glad CarPlay is supporting other mapping apps in iOS 12.
  - optimuspaul 8y ago
    inaccurate in what ways? I have found them to be fairly accurate in terms of roads and what not. Finding precise locations of addresses is hit or miss. Google and Bing have a huge head start there, but in my opinion are still full of inaccuracies. I have even found some things that google is just wrong but apple maps get it right. I'm obsessed with maps though, so I will spend hours comparing the results of google, apple and bing.
- chrisjc 8y ago
  This might be the 'feature' that finally brings me to use an iphone instead of android. The lack of this kind of customization has kept me away from iOS until now.
- tpush 8y ago
  A lot of those users complaining are probably not US based. For example, where I live in Germany Apple Maps for the most part doesn't even have transit, while Google Maps has had it since years. Or just recently I was looking for a supermarket which was supposedly very close to my location, so I looked it up on Apple Maps where the next one was. Told me it as 14km away. Turns out it was actually one street from where I was around a corner. Google Maps had the correct location. I prefer Apple Maps' UX, but their data is either outdated or just plain wrong at times, which makes it effectively useless for a lot of things I now use Google Maps for.
  - DavideNL 8y ago
    100% agree. I'm in the Netherlands (Europe, next to Germany) and live in a city with a population of ~120000 people. I often don't find places in Apple Maps, even in the middle of the city. Google Maps just finds everything. Recently, they build a few new roads which Apple Maps didn't know about (Google maps recognised it very early), so they keep sending people in the wrong direction. After about 3 months i got so annoyed that i sent feedback to Apple Maps to have it added which took me like half an hour to get through the process of adding/feedback. The sad thing is, the reason why Apple Maps is worse, is probably because they respect peoples privacy. Unlike Google, who follows android phones everywhere (1), and thus has more data, and better maps. 1) "Google has been tracking Android users even with location services turned off": https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-track-android-users-location-services-turned-off-sim https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/22/google-tr...
- kurthr 8y ago
  I used it very recently to get to two separate trail heads in Arizona. Both of them are used by hundreds of people a day and are otherwise well marked. Using Apple Maps I was both times led to dead-end dirt roads or Posted (trespass) private property gates that were miles from the correct location. Had I been hiking, it would have been quite unsafe. I will not, with any alternative, use it again. In one case it was a 15min drive to the correct location on the other side of a mesa, which popped up on G-Maps immediately (the other was only a few miles away, but through ranch property).
- vajrabum 8y ago
  Apple maps has some good features I use. It's great for finding your car in a big parking lot and it's integration with Open Table and Weather is also nice.
- MBCook 8y ago
  The lane guidance is great, but sadly it was added in iOS 11. Other products have had it for years. Still, I’m a happy user of Apple Maps. I dislike Google Maps and am thrilled to have a quality alternative.
bitL 8y ago
I was once directed to a shortest albeit extremely steep route; once my car ended up on a slope with sliding front wheels I decided to return back :) (Tenerife, small roads around La Orotava towards Teide)
mayniac 8y ago
First time using Apple Maps last year on a business phone. Searched a (relatively generic) hotel I was trying to get to in France. The first match was in NYC. The one I was looking for, which was closest to me distance wise, was about fifth in the list. Location was on, Apple Maps knew where I was, but for some reason wasn't factoring in my location to my search. Gave it a few more chances but it kept doing the same thing. I'd put in McDonalds and it would give me a random McDonalds somewhere in America while I was looking for one in London. Decided if it was so badly developed that it can't search properly using an incredibly simple "pick the closest one to the user" criteria I'm not trusting it to navigate me when I'm walking, let alone driving.

selimthegrim 8y ago

In New Orleans, Apple Maps continues to give users extremely dangerous directions from BUS US 90 E to I 10 E that require cutting across two lanes of traffic in a few hundred feet when an alternate, safe ramp has been in place since 1989 (!). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontchartrain_Expressway#cite_note-T-P_3-8-89-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontchartrain_Expressway#cite_...

scrooched_moose 8y ago
When I was in Duluth, MN a few months back it told me "You have arrived at your destination" as I was driving 70 MPH down the interstate. The restaurant I was going to is above one of several tunnels under the city which hold I-35. Apple Maps assumed this meant the restaurant was actually on the shoulder of the interstate. Took me an extra 15 minutes to backtrack and get there on the correct surface roads. Immediately switched back to Google/Here https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pickwick+Restaurant+%26+Pub/@46.7914405,-92.0929837,278m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x52ae52c413e7142b:0x25055b614acd8e84!2sFitger's+Brewhouse+Brewery+and+Grille!8m2!3d46.792397!4d-92.090552!3m4!1s0x52ae52c6acd80545:0xdc4103d2542f598d!8m2!3d46.7916637!4d-92.0915115 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pickwick+Restaurant+%26+Pu...
- rectang 8y ago
  This has happened to me with Google Maps, too. The destination was up a hill and over a ridge on a side street. "You have arrived!".
  - freehunter 8y ago
    This happened to an Uber driver when I was a passenger, too. He needed to get off the highway and then turn left, he got off the highway and Google Maps told him to make a u-turn, so he crossed the (paved) median and got onto the on-ramp. Once we passed the hotel, Google Maps told him to stop and let me out... still on the on-ramp. We had to turn off the mapping and turn on some common sense.
- toasterlovin 8y ago

poulsbohemian 8y ago

Maybe a coincidence, but I noticed this week that without wifi enabled the location service has been particularly bad - at least four blocks difference. I generally leave wifi off and had never noticed that degree of accuracy prior to updating earlier this week.

aetherson 8y ago
It's a coincidence. Your raw location comes from GPS, cell towers, and (if it's on) wifi, not from the Apple Map's services.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  > It's a coincidence. Your raw location comes from GPS, cell towers, and (if it's on) wifi, not from the Apple Map's services. IIRC Apple has their own wardriving database which makes the WiFi-based location services work, it's possible that was flushed and not refreshed from their services.
  - jacinda 8y ago
    I think your memory is accurate. When I've had WiFi turned off in the past I'll sometimes get a pop-up message on my iPhone suggesting turning WiFi to improve location accuracy.
  - aetherson 8y ago
    Yes, they do, but my parent was saying that his location was worse, with wifi off in the last week, than it was before, also with wifi off. Apple Maps being up and down won't affect your location accuracy if your wifi is off. (My parent was almost certainly incorrect. Having wifi off has always made location pretty bad on iPhones.)

LoSboccacc 8y ago

both of them will be mad

yalogin 8y ago

Kind of unfair but any thread about Maps turns into piling on the product rather than actually talking about the issue at hand. I thought Apple maps is actually quite good now. What would it take for that impression to go away?

moojd 8y ago
Anecdotally, it still can't navigate to my old apartment in ATL (a complex that has been there for decades.) There are also lots of rural areas I visit that Google Maps has no problem finding that Apple Maps cannot locate. There has yet to be a time that Google Maps failed to get me within a couple of lots of my destination while Apple Maps has been off by more than a mile multiple times.
- optimuspaul 8y ago
  I was in Seattle a few weeks ago and Google Maps consistently had me 2 blocks north of my actual location, but Apple maps had me within 100 feet. I thought it was super interesting, but I didn't think too much about it at the time.
- alasdair_ 8y ago
  Rather irritatingly, my house address seems to lead people to a random location two miles away when entered into google maps but the house next door works perfectly. It makes using Uber or any other google maps-based app particularly irritating and as-yes there is no fix after almost a year of reports. Open Street Maps works perfectly well, as does apple.
- Posibyte 8y ago
  In my small town, we have a long street that's just a strip of restaurants. Google and Bing get it right, Apple Maps lists the entire mile-long strip as KFC's. If you select one, it's the same KFC. Been that way since launch. And not a huge deal, we're a tiny town, but it's just humorous and weird when others don't have that issue.
  - 8y ago

carapace 8y ago

> Whilst Apple’s system status reports no issues

Readywater 8y ago

I read this as “Users unable to reach places” and thought “That’s just apple maps.”

unstatusthequo 8y ago

They should sort that product out before venturing into the self driving car world

neduma 8y ago

there are lot of good materials here for comedy writing about maps apps.

jraph 8y ago

This could happen with any online service people rely on. For maps and directions, at least at some places, decent offline solutions exist and not relying on availability of a third party service and a good internet connection is helpful (and is probably better for privacy). Doing this for enough services also might be a way to lower energy consumption (?) and mobile bills.