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There's also the fact that Google Map data is just flat out wrong in many places in the middle of the country, it says my house is my neighbor's house and so on

There's also the fact that Google Map data is just flat out wrong in many places in the middle of the country, it says my house is my neighbor's house and so on down the block, everyone is off by one. I have tried to contact Google and get this fixed at least a dozen times over the past decade, always ignored. They used to have a whole community mapping thing where you could submit issues with the map, but those apparently are ignored. It's a real nightmare trying to convince the insurance company and local government that google is wrong, love how that's my responsibility too.

ryandrake 8y ago
It's funny, because out of the things that people complain about in modern navigation apps, "showing the right user location" is usually not that high on the list. There are so many other more pressing problems to solve. Map data is often inaccurate, bordering on unusable in less populated areas, and map data providers are colossally slow to update and correct their data. Navigation app UI is still surprisingly bad, even though this has been an area of fierce competition for at least a decade. Geocoding and reverse geocoding is still not perfect, but it's dependent on good map data. Accurate traffic is hard. Routing is pretty much solved but again, dependent on good map and traffic data, so it's perceived as needing improvement. Business search is hard because the underlying data changes so often, and for most nav system vendors, is not their core business so they ship something crappy. Most of these things are not improved by getting slightly better user position, so it's surprising Uber is investing so much into this research.