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Honestly I prefer Apple Maps over Google these days. This is mostly opinion and feel, but it "feels" like: * Google is becoming less correct - ex: "use the ri

• gboss 4y ago
  I completely agree about the unimportant details. It frustratingly cuts up a long stretch of freeway into alerts to stay left or right at unimportant exits. This often encourages me to be on the wrong side of the highway especially if it’s telling me to stay left at a small road exit when a mile later I need to be in the right lanes for a freeway split. It’s definitely gotten worse this past year
• indecisive_user 4y ago
  The biggest anti-feature of google maps by far is the 'Change Car Icon' popup when you tap anywhere remotely close to your blue nav icon. Oh, trying to tap to take an alternate route on the map? Want to tap to add a gas station stop to your route? Sorry, the touch target is too close to your nav icon, but hey at least you can cycle through 3 different car styles endlessly. What a waste of resources.
  • pigeonhole123 4y ago
    I’m sure their engagement metrics are amazing for that feature. “Hey, look, Bob used our new feature three times last night!”
  • cercatrova 4y ago
    I like the car changing feature. I changed mine to a cute toy-car-esque one.
• deanCommie 4y ago
  You've obviously never driven with someone from an older generation. My dad when driving on the highway and the road veers in any way that is in any way not a BLATANTLY obvious exit: "What do I do? Which way do I go?" Me: "It's fine dad, just keep left. That's the way the main highway is heading" My dad when Google Maps suggests a route that isn't the most direct way possible: "Why is it telling me to go this way? That's not the fastest route." Me: "Dad, the app knows about traffic conditions. There's probably a good reason why it's suggesting this way" My dad when he knows that 4 hours a way there is a bridge or a tunnel that has incremental conditions: "We should look up to see if the bridge is busy so that we can decide now whether in 2 hours we will pick a different route" All these notifications are SUPER important for a certain type of driver - an older generation that has trouble with letting go of trust, and will insist on giving you directions to their house instead of just telling you the address. And all these notifications can be silenced (If you click on the Microphone in the app while in Navigation mode, there are 3 options - 1/ fully silent, 2/ all notifications, 3/ only important notifications)
  • uncomputation 4y ago
    > You've obviously never driven with someone from an older generation. Lol dude, your dad is not representative of an entire generation.
  • elzbardico 4y ago
    Man, I have some ancient folks in my family, verging on the 80s, and they are not technophobes. On the contrary, sometimes they annoy me with their over-trusting of google. My uncles trust google maps way more than they trust me.
  • ComputerGuru 4y ago
    ~All our parents grew up without a handheld device giving them prompts every twenty seconds. You are being really arrogant by thinking an entire generation is less capable than anyone on here and “needs” that handholding more than “we” do.
    • izzydata 4y ago
• chrischen 4y ago
  Apple’s voice prompts UX is better than Google. Apple tells you when to turn based on the traffic lights, rather than by distance, as well as guidance on which lane to stay in. The only problem is sometimes it misses lights or stop signs. For example: turn right at the traffic lights after the next one vs “turn right in 500 meters.”
  • ytpete 4y ago
    Google Maps has been showing traffic lights (and stop signs) on the route ahead for the last couple months – so I wonder if they will be shifting soon to a similar way of indicating upcoming turns. This seems like the kind of thing that's great if the map data is extremely accurate, but far worse than the older style if there's any chance of mis-counting lights. Even hitting a glitch once (e.g. it says 2 lights when it's really 3) could hurt trust in the app's navigation a lot.
    • chrischen 4y ago
      I’ve found lights data on Apple map to be fairly accurate. Rarely does it miss one or think a 4 way light is a 4 way stop sign intersection.
  • jhugo 4y ago
    Apple Maps directions also has an "alerts only" mode which will shut up completely unless you need to know something urgent (e.g. you are approaching a 60 km/h speed trap and going faster than 60 km/h). If you have the watch it will gently tap your wrist shortly before each turn, and it displays the turn in a very clear, uncluttered way on the watch screen, which you can clearly comprehend without needing to take your hand off the wheel. I find this is great in rental cars if you have no phone mount nor CarPlay and you want to avoid needing to interact with your phone while driving.
    • Sirened 4y ago
      I love maps on the watch but it is incredibly annoying that you can't activate the screen (ie raise to wake) while keeping your hands on the wheel.
• jimbokun 4y ago
  > - ex: taking small side roads to a left turn onto a busy road with poor visibility and no light rather than right turns to the main road and signaled lefts Encountered this on my last vacation. > - ex: I don't need to be told to stay on just because an exit ramp has a disappearing lane I've started to realize getting to some places is actually quite simple, but made to seem complicated by the constant Google instructions to "use the left 2 lanes to stay on [major road]", "use the right three lanes to stay on [major road]". Would help to relax if it was just "stay on [major road] for next 20 miles" instead of constant false indicators of a turn coming up.
  • Tyr42 4y ago
    Yes please. Or when I'm driving and there are roundabouts where I'm just going straight through. Just tell me my final turn, I k is how these roundabouts work.
  • pkulak 4y ago
    > Would help to relax if it was just "stay on [major road] for next 20 miles" instead of constant false indicators of a turn coming up. I hate this so much, and they all do it (I guess not Apple, interesting...). I live on the West coast, US, so road trips for me are often 100s of miles on I5. But instead of knowing that I have 337 miles left on this highway, I instead know that it's 3.2 miles until the next time I'll not be exiting the freeway.
  • nucleardog 4y ago
    And then, for all the chatiness… when you finally _do_ need to exit… half the time it tells me to exit in 15 miles then says nothing for 23 more exits until it says “take the exit” as I’m passing the gore and have missed my exit. I’d rather it “stay on this road for 20 miles” then start giving me “exit in 1mi”, “exit in 1/4 mile”, “you’ve passed the last exit, next exit is yours!”.
    • brewdad 4y ago
      My pet peeve is when I'm in an unfamiliar area but know my exit is coming in a mile or two it will keep reminding me to not be in the rightmost lane, then 1/4 mile or less from my exit it will suddenly tell me GET RIGHT AND EXIT NOW! In moderately heavy traffic, that's not always easy to do. There was no reason I couldn't have been in that lane earlier.
• mrtksn 4y ago
  I also find that the traffic data has become much less accurate. Once made me miss a flight because google insisted that this alternative route is much faster only to find out that it was actually much much worse, then rerouted to the original one only to add 40 minutes to the travel time.
  • ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
    If 40 min made you miss a flight, you left too late.
    • mwint 4y ago
      If you don’t miss a flight occasionally, you’re leaving too early ;)
      • ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
        And people wonder why I take the train. At least it's much more of a pleasure here in Europe than some other places.
    • kofejnik 4y ago
      if you never ever miss a flight, you waste too much time at airports
• CamperBob2 4y ago
  Agreed on all points, but especially "Keep straight at the intersection.... Now keep straight." It makes me want to drive into a lamp post just to silence the voices^W^W unnecessary verbiage.
• freetime2 4y ago
  > ex: taking small side roads to a left turn onto a busy road with poor visibility and no light rather than right turns to the main road and signaled lefts This is the biggest reason I try to avoid using Google Maps for navigation. It also tends to send me down narrow residential roads where I have to constantly be on the lookout for children, pedestrians, cyclists, or people backing out of their driveways. Or agricultural roads without a divider line where I need to slow down and pull to the shoulder a bit every time I pass oncoming traffic. And in the winter time these roads can be especially dangerous since they aren’t prioritized for snow removal. Most of the time I’d much rather just take an extra 5 minutes to get where I am going if it results in a safer and more comfortable trip. The built-in GPS in my car does a much better job at this (although not without it’s own quirks) than both Google and Apple maps.
  • ryantgtg 4y ago
    My wife thinks I’m crazy, but I do all my mapping by staring at the map for a couple minutes devising my own route in my head and memorizing it.
• protastus 4y ago
  That's because Google Maps got massively worse over the years. I'll add to your list of issues: * distracting me while I'm driving with a banner that blocks the bottom half of the screen, with a message written in small font, asking if a speed trap is still on the freeway. This is distracting and unexpected, leading me to take my eyes off the road to get a basic understanding of what the app needs, which starts with reading the text. Ironically, the font is small due to the inclusion of a "reminder" to only interact when it is safe. * screen space co-opted by ads, promotions and reviews for local businesses. Google Maps and Gmail are products that rose to the top by being best in class. I can only assume that the smart people who built the original product, made many wise choices, and said "no" when it mattered are long gone. The new blood is not of the same caliber, and can only get promoted if they make changes. Unfortunately for them, the user experience was already excellent when they joined, and thus was difficult to improve upon. Seems like they resort to adding details that aren't relevant to the user, and trying to monetize things that are not core to the product. Every instance of feature creep and every dark pattern pulls the experience away from optimality, regressing on goals that were achieved 10 years ago.
  • caycep 4y ago
    I feel like that's one big hurdle in tech in general. the best and brightest want to work on development of the best new shiny thing. but maintaining quality and "maintenance engineering" is the boring but important part in terms of reliability...but that's when the geniuses bolt and leave the company to do something else.
  • acka 4y ago
    Ads in an app which is being used for navigation while driving, are you serious? if so, then Google should be taken to court for reckless endangerment. In-app ads (tailored for attention grabbing and engagement) and safe driving are simply incompatible. No sane pilot would ever accept ads popping up on the controls in an airplane cockpit, so let's keep them away from a car's dashboard, too. The fewer distractions the better.
    • illiac786 4y ago
• Ensorceled 4y ago
  > * Google is taking me on routes that are much less safe and more challenging But you'll shave 30 seconds off your trip ... unless you miss the light, then it was a mistake. The main problem is that a bunch of these route decisions really only make any sense at all if you are a very aggressive driver.
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    > unless you miss the light I've been running into this constantly. It seems like it has no allowance for the average number of seconds spent at a light, so it sends me routes cutting through town that end up being slower because of all the signals, when it could have just sent me up the freeway three more exits. I've learned to be critical of the route and look before I leave.
    • fluidcruft 4y ago
      I live in an area that has many traffic circles and Google Maps seems to actively avoid lights and prefer routes that use circles (which is completely fine with me and preferred after I got comfortable using circles). I think Google knows how much time people topically spend going through each intersection. But it may just be the eco-friendly option. One think that really messed things up is that route option state is pretty hidden. My wife was ranting at how stupid Google Maps was because my daughter was using Apple Maps in the drivers seat and Apple Maps was doing sane things and Google Maps was doing dumb things. Apparently this had gone on for weeks. Turns out somehow she had "avoid highways" selected and didn't realize it. The app really does seem to get worse and worse though. I think it's trying to push me to switch to using voice commands but I'm too dumb to remember the incantations yet.
      • rootusrootus 4y ago
        I have felt for a while now that Google Maps does a lot of A/B testing on routes. Probably they inherited this from Waze -- I quit using Waze years ago because it routinely picked a route that I knew would be slower from my experience in the area. So I'd ignore the turn it wanted to make in that direction, and it would re-route on the better path... and the time estimate would drop a few minutes. So it -knew- the correct path was shorter but was sending me the longer way just because it wanted to be sure it was in fact the longer way?
• shakezula 4y ago
  I also feel like Google Maps has become incredibly slow, lagging behind my real location by seconds and then “snapping” back to where I really every several seconds. It’s disorienting and Google Maps used to be the one that didn’t have that problem and all the others did - now that’s reversed in my experience.
• izzydata 4y ago
  I have been using Google maps for years to drive from my place to my parents place which takes roughly 7 hours traveling across the midwest of the US. It used to take a rather minimal number of different highways. Recently though it decided to take me on an extremely annoying new route that has me going through a bunch of tiny seemingly abandoned towns with lots of backroads and even unpaved roads all to save less than 5 minutes. Now I have to make absolute sure I select the proper route beforehand. But even when I do that it constantly nags me along the way that it has determined there is a faster route so I need to dismiss it. I can't trust it to not take me on some wild back road through a field.
  • stickfigure 4y ago
    Your definition of annoying is not universal. I would happily pay a minimal number of extra minutes to get a more interesting route. Saving 5 minutes is a bonus. Wild back road through a field? Yes please, every time.
    • astrange 4y ago
      That's what Waze is for. But sometimes the exciting route is an unprotected left turn against traffic that needs 10-20 minutes of waiting.
  • ben_w 4y ago
    It literally took me through a field when I was looking for my B&B at the end of a day of cycling the EuroVelo 15 route. Not a road though a field, it wanted me to use a muddy ploughed footpath in the actual field itself.
    • pharmakom 4y ago
      I had a very similar experience in France! Do yourself a favour and get a dedicated bike GPS and plan the best route ahead of your trip. It's much more enjoyable this way!
      • 4y ago
• throwawayboise 4y ago
  > Google tries to send me on wild boondoggles literally all the time. It sends me off highway in an attempt to avoid traffic That's odd, that's my biggest complaint with Apple Maps, and I feel Google rarely does it.
• potatolicious 4y ago
  This feels a bit petty but a huge part of why I use Apple Maps over GMaps now is just the performance. GMaps is sluggish and can't reliably hit 60Hz even on brand new hardware. We have space-age CPUs and GPUs in our pockets that are basically supercomputers! They are faster than most laptops! But somehow Apple Maps scrolls and zooms like butter but Google Maps drops frames all over the floor and makes the whole experience Powerpoint-like. It feels like Google Maps has spent the last few years packing a kitchen sink's worth of features into itself (much of which seems of dubious utility) but at the same time completely lost the plot on really basic fundamentals like whether or not their renderer can maintain 60Hz on an iPhone 13 Pro, or whether their transit overlays continue to generate illegible lines.
  • FireBeyond 4y ago
    On macOS with a gigabit connection, I consistently get map/tile issues in Apple maps that will just not load, even if I scroll or zoom. Huge swathes of gray. And then zooming in is entirely glitchy (and this is on a 2019 Mac Pro with a W5700X GPU).
• gigatexal 4y ago
  Google maps is still the best way to find or discover things in a city. Find a place to eat, check railings, etc. Otherwise I really do like Apple Maps.
• chipotle_coyote 4y ago
  > Google is taking me on routes that are much less safe and more challenging While I don’t know that this is Waze’s fault, er, influence, I can’t help but be suspicious. I was on the Waze bandwagon years ago, but soon realized that Waze was increasingly becoming the algorithmic version of your Crazy Uncle Bob who always insists he “knows a shortcut” that involves going over three barely-maintained mountain roads and an unprotected left turn onto a six-lane highway.
• erichurkman 4y ago
  My most recent one was Google Maps routing me off of interstates onto narrow rural roads to save a few minutes. At dusk. In the midwest. Clearly no one working on that algorithm has experience driving rural roads at dusk and dodging deer!
• ALittleLight 4y ago
  Google Maps has a "feature" where it will suggest an alternate route if it finds one it thinks will save time. I've found the alternate routes don't usually save much, if any time, but they also tend to be more work driving - more turns, off the interstate, whatever. The absolutely blood boiling part about it is that Google will tell me that it's going to take me on an alternate route, unless I press "No" or "Cancel" or something on the phone within a few minutes. How am I supposed to get my phone and press cancel while driving? I realize some people may have their phone / Google Maps integrated with the car, or may use their phone while driving, but I don't. For me the phone is basically announcing "Hey, I'm gonna annoy you in a few minutes, okay?"
  • ricardobeat 4y ago
    Had this happen on a recent trip, and the worst part is that it changed it's mind and updated the route seconds before an exit - which we were already taking. Instead of reverting to the old route, it comes up with a 20km detour to get back to the (new) route. The best action is to simply stop navigation, and start a completely new route. Incredibly stressful.
    • ALittleLight 4y ago
      It's just so shocking and so baffling to me that Google could actually release this feature without considering that maybe people won't be able to interact with their phone while you know they are driving. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt - but this design seems absolutely braindead to me.
      • joecool1029 4y ago
        It's TERRIBLE on motorcycle and honestly has probably killed some people. For context, on motorcycle I'll plan out a route beforehand, then I would have Google Maps play through earpiece in helmet, phone remains in pocket. For some years I was using pebble smartwatch which would vibrate with the turn notification (and I could glance it quickly to verify if I wasn't wearing earpiece or couldn't hear it). In all of those described cases I can't interact with the phone. At some point Apple or Google decided to block the turn notifications from pinging over to my watch, so I had to exclusively wear earpiece to hear directions. To tie in with the rest of the thread, Google Maps will automatically suggest whatever route it wants and since I cannot interact with the phone on this setup, it will just go with whatever it wants to do, which often leads me onto roads under construction and other potentially dangerous routes. No way to turn off this 'feature'.
• prescriptivist 4y ago
  I have a Ford and actually prefer the build-in SYNC maps. The SYNC maps will do interesting things like go into split screen at various times and visualize the lane I'm supposed to be in. It also will show the speed limit on roads I am driving even when I don't have a destination setup. I had used Google Maps + Carplay for years, dismissing the built-in navigation, but during a long road trip recently I realized just how bright the 8inch screen in my truck is, even in dark mode. I switched to the built-in nav and it was significantly darker and I realized I could literally see more of the road with it than with Carplay because of the lack of added ambient light from the screen. After using it for a while I realized it's good enough and in some cases even better.
• dougmwne 4y ago
  Your feedback is all related to directions, but I have also found Google Maps to have an increasingly cluttered and unfriendly UI just for browsing and searching maps on mobile. Everything seems to be too many taps away and basic use cases like looking for the nearest restaurant are quite frustrating. Switching to Apple Maps was like the first day of spring. Google as an overall company seems to have jumped the shark some years ago and the slow decline is starting to become apparent through many of their products, search included.
  • solraph 4y ago
    I strongly suspect that problem is that Google Maps (and various other Google products) were effectively "done"[0] a few years ago, but the team needs to justify it's existence somehow, so product managers and engineers are literally just changing things to have something to do. [0] With the caveat that there's no doubt a massive backlog of missing backend data like bike lanes and public transport data that still needs to be filled in.
• stickfigure 4y ago
  I'm going to suggest that a lot of this is your personal preference, and without more data (which presumably Google has) it's not fair to be so critical. Google does periodically ask "how did you like your trip?" so they're collecting the information. I personally like the small side roads. I happily take alternative routes and saving time is just a bonus. Taking a wild guess, I would bet that majority of the population likes the alternative routing - either because they like the road less traveled or they're impatient and actually care about 3 minutes.
  • zamadatix 4y ago
    Majority can be good for helping decide defaults but it's a horrible metric to declare it must always behave like so. Particularly when the majority are in a minority of at least one of the choices, which I strongly suspect would be the case here.
• slaymaker1907 4y ago
  I use it a lot for cycling/walking/transit and I despise how difficult they make it to see what the road names are now. They make you zoom in really far just to see what is basic information for a map.
• WheatM 4y ago
• mjrbrennan 4y ago
  > Google is taking me on routes that are much less safe and more challenging > - ex: taking small side roads to a left turn onto a busy road with poor visibility and no light rather than right turns to the main road and signaled lefts This one irks me the most, so often it will take me a way where I need to get across a busy 4 lane road instead of taking me on a slightly different route where I will end up on that road instead, or at traffic lights where I can actually turn properly. I feel like it waaaayy over-optimizes for time "saved" to the point where it takes you a bone-headed way just to "save" you twenty seconds out of your whole trip, but _only_ if you are incredibly lucky with lights or breaks in traffic. After reading this thread I am going to try out Apple Maps again and see whether it's any better.
• enw 4y ago
  My girlfriend and I have long switched between Apple Maps and Google Maps. Google Maps' terrible UX has become a joke now. It mentions irrelevant details (e.g. emphasis on compass directions, which no modern person relies on) and uses esoteric language when plain English works (can't remember well, but things like "stay on right of the fork"). It just felt... badly designed, if not amateurish. Apple Maps is far from perfect, but the cradle feels warmer.
• shantnutiwari 4y ago
  >Google tries to send me on wild boondoggles literally all the time. It sends me off highway in an attempt to avoid traffic Same happened to me several years ago, I stopped using Google maps. It tries to hyper optimise the journey-- in one case, there was some traffic on the highway so it took me thru the city. The problem was-- even with traffic the highway was still moving at 40mph. In the city, I was at 10mph and a red light every 5 minutes. And at one point, it tried to save me literally 5 feet by taking me through a truck parking lane-- that is not only dangerous but probabbly illegal as well. I dumped google for Apple Maps, havent looked back since