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Apple maps is an odd sort of problem for apple to have taken on. First, it's Google head on. This is exactly the stuff where Google is very hard to beat. For A

Apple maps is an odd sort of problem for apple to have taken on. First, it's Google head on. This is exactly the stuff where Google is very hard to beat. For Apple, it's a little outside their strengths. Too fiddly. Every damned place in the world has their own little public transport issues, data sources. Apple are more of a clever solution with the right compromises bunch than a "slog our way through 10 million random issues until a pattern emerges" bunch. I like the moxy, but there's always going to be an "are we the new Bing?" cloud hanging over projects like this, unless and until they "win." All that said, I'm glad there is something out there that isn't google.

pokemongoaway 8y ago
But rewriting from scratch will be a good test to see if software engineering really is in as much if a better state in 2018 as people assume.
GeekyBear 8y ago
It's a classic Apple privacy protection move. Apple wants to allow users to make map data requests anonymously using a random identifier that changes frequently. Google wants to link the device requesting map data to a particular user account. Google was playing hardball and refusing to provide turn by turn directions (as they did on Android) unless Apple stopped protecting their user's privacy. Rather than give in, Apple decided to roll their own mapping service. It's all about the difference between how the two companies make money. Google chooses to monetize their users' data. For instance, using their location data to tell it's advertising customers that a user has entered a store that sells their product. More recently, they have started buying credit card purchase data from third party data brokers so they can go farther and inform an advertiser that someone who saw their ad ended up buying the product advertised. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607938/google-now-tracks-your-credit-card-purchases-and-connects-them-to-its-online-profile-of-you/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607938/google-now-tracks-...
drakenot 8y ago
This was not the point of creating Maps at all. It was to be able to approach the negotiating table with Google over maps from a more favorable position. Google was making certain demands to add turn-by-turn directions to the original maps app that Apple didn’t want to concede to.
biztos 8y ago
I always understood it as avoiding a complete dependency on Google, since (some form of) Maps is a must-have feature for any modern smartphone. After the Schmidt/Android thing I think the Apple leadership basically assumed Google would screw them over sooner or later if they could.
- s3r3nity 8y ago
  This. So many folks (myself included) rely on our phones for GPS & navigation, and having the UX for that be monopolized by one player is leaving a huge use case for your phone in the hands of your biggest competitor. I think Apple has the opportunity to make a very unique & compelling experience, with their deep integration with the OS that they don't offer to outside developers. Though we'll see if they can actually execute.
  - amelius 8y ago
    > and having the UX for that be monopolized by one player is leaving a huge use case for your phone in the hands of your biggest competitor. This makes me wonder: where is "Apple search"?
    - swaroop 8y ago
      It's called Siri and Spotlight :) For example, see Safari Suggestions - https://imgur.com/a/uyd20c6 https://imgur.com/a/uyd20c6
      - amelius 8y ago
        That would be true if Siri and Spotlight were the main entry-point for users to start a web search, and I doubt that.
        saagarjha 8y ago
        For many Safari users, it is the the main entry-point for searches.
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
Google is doing a great job of making their mobile app a PITA to use. I just want to see a map, not a persistent screen filling list that refuses to be dismissed. If Apple were smart they would make it cross platform and strengthen their data collection with Android users.
- atomical 8y ago
  I do cross country drives and love PIP on Android. I also like how I can schedule a stop at a gas station or grocery store based on how it impacts my route. The only complaint I have about maps is that it doesn't seem to know where I'm going next. Nine times out of ten the place I'm navigating to is the same place I navigated to from the same spot yesterday.
  - dmix 8y ago
    Google Maps lets you save common routes (plus detects ones you haven't yet) and pull them up quickly... like a daily commute route. Which powers the 'warning your drive to x is 10min delayed with traffic accident' stuff on Google Assistant. The problem is that while Google Maps is very popular, it's not easy to find and use these features. I just came across is accidentally one day. Or it's possible Google asked me if I wanted to save if when it detected I do it often. It's been a while so my memory is a bit hazy on the original workflow I took.
    - atomical 8y ago
      Why am I in charge of managing this in the age of AI? That's my complaint.
    - kenjackson 8y ago
      Also Google will use your calendar to populate the list of destinations -- I think.
    - JadeNB 8y ago
      > The problem is that while Google Maps is very popular, it's not easy to find and use these features. While talking about hard-to-find-and-use features: sometimes, when I try to get directions, Google offers to download them for me for offline use. This is frustrating because it only happens sometimes, but I want it almost all the time. There's a relatively easy way to download offline directions for a specific region, but I can't find a way to download offline directions for a specific route (including, presumably, a small fuzz of nearby information—I don't know what it downloads when it offers, since I find this hard to reproduce). Just downloading all the regions involved is impractical for, e.g., cross-country drives. Do you know how to download offline directions for an arbitrary route, when Google doesn't prompt me to do so?
draw_down 8y ago
Of course it's understandable why they've taken this on, but it's not a surprise what the result has been. For me, the biggest shame is that the quality of maps on the iPhone is worse than it used to be- it used to be Google provided the APIs and Apple wrote the app. Both did the part they are best at doing.
dageshi 8y ago
I think you've nailed this on the head. I can't help but feel the whole "random huge messiness" of maps data must drive Apple to distraction, they're dealing with something that they can't control when their entire ethos is about fine tuning products to the nth degree... I really don't think Apple is either capable or comfortable with dealing with the kind of messiness maps data represents vs google, who is essentially an expert on wrangling such data.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  I think you underestimate Apple as an engineering organization. They have repeatedly pulled off stunning technical achievements in widely disparate domains.
fareesh 8y ago
This is my #1 complaint about the product as well - it would be really nice if they let you dismiss or collapse the list.
macintux 8y ago
I'll quote my reply from a similar comment... What choice do they have? Maps, location data, and the services they enable are critical to mobile devices today, and will only get more so with AR and devices without screens. “Everybody but Google” isn’t good enough judging by the current state of affairs, and Google doesn’t play by the same privacy rules as Apple, so they seem to have few options.
- tibbon 8y ago
  > What choice do they have? Perhaps this would be too risky, but they could license it from Google?
  - creyes 8y ago
    Make a trade maybe? Google already pays Apple a significant amount to be the default search engine
  - macintux 8y ago
    They did, originally, but Google reportedly wasn't willing to give them everything they wanted without sharing more user data in return. This seems better for consumers in the long run: better to have two maps apps on the device, both attempting to be comprehensive and accurate.
    - puzzle 8y ago
      Originally, they couldn't license the actual data, either, because at least the road network wasn't Google's to license. It came from TeleAtlas (after Nokia had bought NavTeq), Zenrin for Japan and a few more. Things were tricky like that before the Ground Truth project (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsbLEtS0uls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsbLEtS0uls) covered enough of the planet. When Google launched navigation on Android, it lost money in countries not covered by Ground Truth, which I think was everywhere outside the US. That's because TeleAtlas and co. charged N times as much when the same data was used for real time directions.
  - IBM 8y ago
scarface74 8y ago
Apple doesn't have to "win". Apple just needs to have something good enough for them to tightly integrate into their other services. Bing's purpose for Microsoft is both to be a revenue generator and to not be dependent on Google for search. Apple's only motivation for Maps is not to be dependent on Google for Maps and for integration into iOS. Every time someone doesn't use Google Maps, Google loses ad revenue. If people don't use Apple's maps, Apple has lost nothing but a few bragging rights.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  If people don't use the app, it gets worse for other users of the app (network effects for traffic, corrections, etc.), which means fewer people use the app, and so on. Ultimately, if the quality of the app is bad, Apple remains dependant on others for mapping services.
- smpetrey 8y ago
  This right here.
DavideNL 8y ago
> This is exactly the stuff where Google is very hard to beat ... because Google/Android abuses peoples privacy by following them everywhere, which gives them an advantage/much more data. "Google admits it tracked user location data even when the setting was turned off" : https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google-location-tracking-cell-tower-data-android-os-firebase-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google-location...
- bitmapbrother 8y ago
  If your going to talk about abusing people's privacy then perhaps you should also mention how Apple abuses the privacy of their Chinese users by allowing the Chinese Government to have unfettered access to all of their cloud data.
  - zapita 8y ago
    That's such an apples-to-oranges comparison... There is nothing Apple can do to preserve their Chinese user's privacy against their own government. Either they stay in China and allow the government to access their citizen's data, or they leave China and another phone manufacturer will allow the government to access their citizen's data. Google on the other hand is under no such pressure to violate their user's privacy. They could stop at any time, but have decided that the increased revenue and margins they can extract from the data is more valuable than their user's privacy. This seems so obvious to me, I don't understand why this false equivalence is brought up so often.
    - sharcerer 8y ago
      China was a big market for Google. But they pulled out for censorship/privacy reasons, letting go of billions of $.
    - petee 8y ago
      > There is nothing Apple can do to preserve their Chinese user's privacy against their own government. Either they stay in China and allow the government to access their citizen's data, or they leave China and another phone manufacturer will allow the government to access their citizen's data. Apple could absolutely leave China if they really cared about privacy; the backlash against the govt would be huge - your argument "but if we're not abusing your privacy, someone else might instead!" just backs the claim that Apple is doing it by choice, and their own free will. Both are doing it for money.
munificent 8y ago
Maps is to Apple as G+ was to Google. Apple doesn't want to do it, they have to do it. They're afraid that without that category of data (in this case location, in G+'s case social versus Facebook), their overall product line won't be able to compete.
briandear 8y ago
At least Apple doesn’t market to me based on places I visit. Tim Cook cares deeply about this, the folks at Google — privacy is contrary to their business model. “Security” is important at Google, but privacy definitely isn’t.
amazingman 8y ago
At this point maps are a platform hygiene factor. If you're going to be Apple, you can't rely on Google or any other 3rd party vendor for what is seen by users as a basic feature.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  I think part of the issue among users is that "rely[ing] on Google" was (and probably still is) a perfectly acceptable approach that already worked reasonably well until Apple inexplicably replaced it with Maps.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    Their reasons for replacing it were entirely explicable. Go look it up.
tinus_hn 8y ago
When Apple started working on Maps Google was the only game in town and they were certainly using that advantage. They set the terms for using peoples location, both for location awareness using Wi-Fi access points and for live traffic tracking. Also the good features were Android only (vector maps, navigation). Shortly after Apple Maps was introduced Google suddenly came through with these features but they lost access to peoples location and being the default app for locations on iOS.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
Apple makes phones, what are phones used for? Messaging, phone calls, maps, and cameras. Everything else is noise. Of those four things, which has the most potential to monetize? Maps. People look for restaurants, for gas, for hotels, for rentals, for real estate, Etc. All of those things are being offered by a vendor who would love to know when you're looking and would love to be able to put their pitch in front of you when you are. Maps is to phones what the browser window is to laptops.
cwp 8y ago
Agreed, but... they've already "won". Winning doesn't mean driving Google Maps out of existence, it just means being good enough that Google can't squeeze concessions out of Apple by threatening to yank GMaps. A few years ago Apple disclosed that Apple Maps has 75% marketshare on iOS. [1] Mission accomplished. [1] https://apnews.com/df90458e58564f19b4b7c8510f9baa67/apple-maps-once-laughingstock-now-dominates-iphones https://apnews.com/df90458e58564f19b4b7c8510f9baa67/apple-ma...
- corobo 8y ago
  If maps is installed on phones as part of the default install doesn't that mean that 25% of people go out of their way to remove or replace it? It says nothing about the users that have no use for maps and just counts them anyway
  - another-one-off 8y ago
    It says nothing about anything, really. There may be specific jurisdictions where Apple maps or Google maps falls over because that is an area they happen to have some bad data for - we can't really tell. Strategically, Apple maps is in a good spot for Apple - Google's offering isn't the major choice of users for a piece of critical functionality.
    - dflock 8y ago
      Apple maps is installed by default on iOS AND is the default mapping app when you tap an address - and you CAN'T change that default on iOS. Given that, their usage numbers aren't as impressive as all that.
- Andrex 8y ago
  Where in the linked article does it say Apple Maps has 75% marketshare? Assuming that number is accurate, as Apple Maps is preinstalled on iPhones it means 25% of users went out of their way to manually remove it. Mission far from accomplished (and hence Apple's efforts in the OP to rebuild Maps' dataset entirely in-house.) I'm also curious what the active usage numbers are versus Google Maps on iOS.
cageface 8y ago
Maps is more than streets and driving directions too. Increasingly I use Google Maps to find & post reviews of local restaurants and cafes and to find interesting new places to go when I'm traveling. Google Maps is in a completely different class for this kind of thing than Apple Maps. Lately it even links to relevant web articles about the best places to visit in a local area. All Apple Maps has to offer here is a sort of half baked integration with Foursquare and TripAdvisor.
cpuguy83 8y ago
Keep in mind before Apple maps, Google maps did not exist on iOS for turn-by-turn nav... once Apple released maps Google quickly followed suite with adding turn-by-turn nav to Google maps for iOS.
Karishma1234 8y ago
I routinely come across people who claim they are using google maps when they don't even have it installed on their phone. They call apple maps => google maps. For majority of those people Apple maps works good enough and for other there is always Google maps. Apple does not have to beat Google maps out of existence, that is not the Apple's objective. Their objective is to make sure they are not dependant on Google for maps. It is easy to build that kind of product.
cupusiyi 8y ago
Careful not to choke on that apple deep in your throat.
eksemplar 8y ago
I wonder why Apple hasn’t adopted and expanded open street maps, it’s frankly of google quality and it’s open.

pokemongoaway 8y ago

But rewriting from scratch will be a good test to see if software engineering really is in as much if a better state in 2018 as people assume.

GeekyBear 8y ago

It's a classic Apple privacy protection move. Apple wants to allow users to make map data requests anonymously using a random identifier that changes frequently. Google wants to link the device requesting map data to a particular user account. Google was playing hardball and refusing to provide turn by turn directions (as they did on Android) unless Apple stopped protecting their user's privacy. Rather than give in, Apple decided to roll their own mapping service. It's all about the difference between how the two companies make money. Google chooses to monetize their users' data. For instance, using their location data to tell it's advertising customers that a user has entered a store that sells their product. More recently, they have started buying credit card purchase data from third party data brokers so they can go farther and inform an advertiser that someone who saw their ad ended up buying the product advertised. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607938/google-now-tracks-your-credit-card-purchases-and-connects-them-to-its-online-profile-of-you/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607938/google-now-tracks-...

drakenot 8y ago

This was not the point of creating Maps at all. It was to be able to approach the negotiating table with Google over maps from a more favorable position. Google was making certain demands to add turn-by-turn directions to the original maps app that Apple didn’t want to concede to.

biztos 8y ago

I always understood it as avoiding a complete dependency on Google, since (some form of) Maps is a must-have feature for any modern smartphone. After the Schmidt/Android thing I think the Apple leadership basically assumed Google would screw them over sooner or later if they could.

s3r3nity 8y ago
This. So many folks (myself included) rely on our phones for GPS & navigation, and having the UX for that be monopolized by one player is leaving a huge use case for your phone in the hands of your biggest competitor. I think Apple has the opportunity to make a very unique & compelling experience, with their deep integration with the OS that they don't offer to outside developers. Though we'll see if they can actually execute.
- amelius 8y ago
  > and having the UX for that be monopolized by one player is leaving a huge use case for your phone in the hands of your biggest competitor. This makes me wonder: where is "Apple search"?
  - swaroop 8y ago
    It's called Siri and Spotlight :) For example, see Safari Suggestions - https://imgur.com/a/uyd20c6 https://imgur.com/a/uyd20c6
    - amelius 8y ago
      That would be true if Siri and Spotlight were the main entry-point for users to start a web search, and I doubt that.
      - saagarjha 8y ago
        For many Safari users, it is the the main entry-point for searches.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago

Google is doing a great job of making their mobile app a PITA to use. I just want to see a map, not a persistent screen filling list that refuses to be dismissed. If Apple were smart they would make it cross platform and strengthen their data collection with Android users.

atomical 8y ago
I do cross country drives and love PIP on Android. I also like how I can schedule a stop at a gas station or grocery store based on how it impacts my route. The only complaint I have about maps is that it doesn't seem to know where I'm going next. Nine times out of ten the place I'm navigating to is the same place I navigated to from the same spot yesterday.
- dmix 8y ago
  Google Maps lets you save common routes (plus detects ones you haven't yet) and pull them up quickly... like a daily commute route. Which powers the 'warning your drive to x is 10min delayed with traffic accident' stuff on Google Assistant. The problem is that while Google Maps is very popular, it's not easy to find and use these features. I just came across is accidentally one day. Or it's possible Google asked me if I wanted to save if when it detected I do it often. It's been a while so my memory is a bit hazy on the original workflow I took.
  - atomical 8y ago
    Why am I in charge of managing this in the age of AI? That's my complaint.
  - kenjackson 8y ago
    Also Google will use your calendar to populate the list of destinations -- I think.
  - JadeNB 8y ago
    > The problem is that while Google Maps is very popular, it's not easy to find and use these features. While talking about hard-to-find-and-use features: sometimes, when I try to get directions, Google offers to download them for me for offline use. This is frustrating because it only happens sometimes, but I want it almost all the time. There's a relatively easy way to download offline directions for a specific region, but I can't find a way to download offline directions for a specific route (including, presumably, a small fuzz of nearby information—I don't know what it downloads when it offers, since I find this hard to reproduce). Just downloading all the regions involved is impractical for, e.g., cross-country drives. Do you know how to download offline directions for an arbitrary route, when Google doesn't prompt me to do so?

draw_down 8y ago

Of course it's understandable why they've taken this on, but it's not a surprise what the result has been. For me, the biggest shame is that the quality of maps on the iPhone is worse than it used to be- it used to be Google provided the APIs and Apple wrote the app. Both did the part they are best at doing.

dageshi 8y ago

I think you've nailed this on the head. I can't help but feel the whole "random huge messiness" of maps data must drive Apple to distraction, they're dealing with something that they can't control when their entire ethos is about fine tuning products to the nth degree... I really don't think Apple is either capable or comfortable with dealing with the kind of messiness maps data represents vs google, who is essentially an expert on wrangling such data.

toasterlovin 8y ago
I think you underestimate Apple as an engineering organization. They have repeatedly pulled off stunning technical achievements in widely disparate domains.

fareesh 8y ago

This is my #1 complaint about the product as well - it would be really nice if they let you dismiss or collapse the list.

macintux 8y ago

I'll quote my reply from a similar comment... What choice do they have? Maps, location data, and the services they enable are critical to mobile devices today, and will only get more so with AR and devices without screens. “Everybody but Google” isn’t good enough judging by the current state of affairs, and Google doesn’t play by the same privacy rules as Apple, so they seem to have few options.

tibbon 8y ago
> What choice do they have? Perhaps this would be too risky, but they could license it from Google?
- creyes 8y ago
  Make a trade maybe? Google already pays Apple a significant amount to be the default search engine
- macintux 8y ago
  They did, originally, but Google reportedly wasn't willing to give them everything they wanted without sharing more user data in return. This seems better for consumers in the long run: better to have two maps apps on the device, both attempting to be comprehensive and accurate.
  - puzzle 8y ago
    Originally, they couldn't license the actual data, either, because at least the road network wasn't Google's to license. It came from TeleAtlas (after Nokia had bought NavTeq), Zenrin for Japan and a few more. Things were tricky like that before the Ground Truth project (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsbLEtS0uls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsbLEtS0uls) covered enough of the planet. When Google launched navigation on Android, it lost money in countries not covered by Ground Truth, which I think was everywhere outside the US. That's because TeleAtlas and co. charged N times as much when the same data was used for real time directions.
- IBM 8y ago

scarface74 8y ago

Apple doesn't have to "win". Apple just needs to have something good enough for them to tightly integrate into their other services. Bing's purpose for Microsoft is both to be a revenue generator and to not be dependent on Google for search. Apple's only motivation for Maps is not to be dependent on Google for Maps and for integration into iOS. Every time someone doesn't use Google Maps, Google loses ad revenue. If people don't use Apple's maps, Apple has lost nothing but a few bragging rights.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lern_too_spel 8y ago
If people don't use the app, it gets worse for other users of the app (network effects for traffic, corrections, etc.), which means fewer people use the app, and so on. Ultimately, if the quality of the app is bad, Apple remains dependant on others for mapping services.
smpetrey 8y ago
This right here.

DavideNL 8y ago

> This is exactly the stuff where Google is very hard to beat ... because Google/Android abuses peoples privacy by following them everywhere, which gives them an advantage/much more data. "Google admits it tracked user location data even when the setting was turned off" : https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google-location-tracking-cell-tower-data-android-os-firebase-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google-location...

bitmapbrother 8y ago
If your going to talk about abusing people's privacy then perhaps you should also mention how Apple abuses the privacy of their Chinese users by allowing the Chinese Government to have unfettered access to all of their cloud data.
- zapita 8y ago
  That's such an apples-to-oranges comparison... There is nothing Apple can do to preserve their Chinese user's privacy against their own government. Either they stay in China and allow the government to access their citizen's data, or they leave China and another phone manufacturer will allow the government to access their citizen's data. Google on the other hand is under no such pressure to violate their user's privacy. They could stop at any time, but have decided that the increased revenue and margins they can extract from the data is more valuable than their user's privacy. This seems so obvious to me, I don't understand why this false equivalence is brought up so often.
  - sharcerer 8y ago
    China was a big market for Google. But they pulled out for censorship/privacy reasons, letting go of billions of $.
  - petee 8y ago
    > There is nothing Apple can do to preserve their Chinese user's privacy against their own government. Either they stay in China and allow the government to access their citizen's data, or they leave China and another phone manufacturer will allow the government to access their citizen's data. Apple could absolutely leave China if they really cared about privacy; the backlash against the govt would be huge - your argument "but if we're not abusing your privacy, someone else might instead!" just backs the claim that Apple is doing it by choice, and their own free will. Both are doing it for money.

munificent 8y ago

Maps is to Apple as G+ was to Google. Apple doesn't want to do it, they have to do it. They're afraid that without that category of data (in this case location, in G+'s case social versus Facebook), their overall product line won't be able to compete.

briandear 8y ago

At least Apple doesn’t market to me based on places I visit. Tim Cook cares deeply about this, the folks at Google — privacy is contrary to their business model. “Security” is important at Google, but privacy definitely isn’t.

amazingman 8y ago

At this point maps are a platform hygiene factor. If you're going to be Apple, you can't rely on Google or any other 3rd party vendor for what is seen by users as a basic feature.

yellowapple 8y ago
I think part of the issue among users is that "rely[ing] on Google" was (and probably still is) a perfectly acceptable approach that already worked reasonably well until Apple inexplicably replaced it with Maps.
- sjwright 8y ago
  Their reasons for replacing it were entirely explicable. Go look it up.

tinus_hn 8y ago

When Apple started working on Maps Google was the only game in town and they were certainly using that advantage. They set the terms for using peoples location, both for location awareness using Wi-Fi access points and for live traffic tracking. Also the good features were Android only (vector maps, navigation). Shortly after Apple Maps was introduced Google suddenly came through with these features but they lost access to peoples location and being the default app for locations on iOS.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

Apple makes phones, what are phones used for? Messaging, phone calls, maps, and cameras. Everything else is noise. Of those four things, which has the most potential to monetize? Maps. People look for restaurants, for gas, for hotels, for rentals, for real estate, Etc. All of those things are being offered by a vendor who would love to know when you're looking and would love to be able to put their pitch in front of you when you are. Maps is to phones what the browser window is to laptops.

cwp 8y ago

Agreed, but... they've already "won". Winning doesn't mean driving Google Maps out of existence, it just means being good enough that Google can't squeeze concessions out of Apple by threatening to yank GMaps. A few years ago Apple disclosed that Apple Maps has 75% marketshare on iOS. [1] Mission accomplished. [1] https://apnews.com/df90458e58564f19b4b7c8510f9baa67/apple-maps-once-laughingstock-now-dominates-iphones https://apnews.com/df90458e58564f19b4b7c8510f9baa67/apple-ma...

corobo 8y ago
If maps is installed on phones as part of the default install doesn't that mean that 25% of people go out of their way to remove or replace it? It says nothing about the users that have no use for maps and just counts them anyway
- another-one-off 8y ago
  It says nothing about anything, really. There may be specific jurisdictions where Apple maps or Google maps falls over because that is an area they happen to have some bad data for - we can't really tell. Strategically, Apple maps is in a good spot for Apple - Google's offering isn't the major choice of users for a piece of critical functionality.
  - dflock 8y ago
    Apple maps is installed by default on iOS AND is the default mapping app when you tap an address - and you CAN'T change that default on iOS. Given that, their usage numbers aren't as impressive as all that.
Andrex 8y ago
Where in the linked article does it say Apple Maps has 75% marketshare? Assuming that number is accurate, as Apple Maps is preinstalled on iPhones it means 25% of users went out of their way to manually remove it. Mission far from accomplished (and hence Apple's efforts in the OP to rebuild Maps' dataset entirely in-house.) I'm also curious what the active usage numbers are versus Google Maps on iOS.

cageface 8y ago

Maps is more than streets and driving directions too. Increasingly I use Google Maps to find & post reviews of local restaurants and cafes and to find interesting new places to go when I'm traveling. Google Maps is in a completely different class for this kind of thing than Apple Maps. Lately it even links to relevant web articles about the best places to visit in a local area. All Apple Maps has to offer here is a sort of half baked integration with Foursquare and TripAdvisor.

cpuguy83 8y ago

Keep in mind before Apple maps, Google maps did not exist on iOS for turn-by-turn nav... once Apple released maps Google quickly followed suite with adding turn-by-turn nav to Google maps for iOS.

Karishma1234 8y ago

I routinely come across people who claim they are using google maps when they don't even have it installed on their phone. They call apple maps => google maps. For majority of those people Apple maps works good enough and for other there is always Google maps. Apple does not have to beat Google maps out of existence, that is not the Apple's objective. Their objective is to make sure they are not dependant on Google for maps. It is easy to build that kind of product.

cupusiyi 8y ago

Careful not to choke on that apple deep in your throat.

eksemplar 8y ago

I wonder why Apple hasn’t adopted and expanded open street maps, it’s frankly of google quality and it’s open.