iPhones originally shipped with Google Maps...Apple Maps didn't exist. One day in 2012, Apple released an OS update that unexpectedly deleted its built-in Goog

iPhones originally shipped with Google Maps...Apple Maps didn't exist. One day in 2012, Apple released an OS update that unexpectedly deleted its built-in Google Maps and replaced it with the brand-new Apple Maps. It was really, really terrible compared to Google Maps. Everyone was shocked to wake up that morning and suddenly not have Google Maps anymore. Everyone would have immediately installed Google Maps except Apple gave Google the barest minimum heads-up about this so they were caught completely flat-footed and actually didn't have a Google Maps app ready for the iOS app store. So for about a month you literally couldn't use Google Maps on the iPhone. Because Apple Maps was so terrible, people looked for an alternative and found Waze. Almost overnight, Waze found itself with 10-20% of the iPhone market, and people really liked it! It was the first navigation app that crowdsourced manual input data from its users and it made it really fun to report accidents, speed traps, road closures, and traffic congestion. It allowed you to message other nearby Waze users to say hi during road trips, and kept a leaderboard of points which was derived from a combination of manual reports and passive speed data collection. The leaderboard was mostly led by truckers but if you were vigilant you could get top ranks on a long road trip. You could also customize your own avatar/icon as it would appear to other drivers, which made following your friends kind of fun on errands or road trips. Waze was also very, very, very aggressive about saving you time. It would provide the absolute most batshit crazy routes to save 2 minutes. If you absolutely, positively needed to save time, you used Waze -- but as a driver using it you had to be 100% on the ball. Google Maps eventually released in the App Store but now there were three main competing products for iPhone users - Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze. I believe for awhile Waze and Google Maps had roughly equal market share. Many years later Apple Maps and Google Maps added speed trap and accident report features, and Apple Maps finally decided to spend billions of dollars to update its map accuracy, so now all the navigation apps play in the same league at least. Google acquired Waze in 2013 to capture the customer data, under an agreement to allow it to run mostly independently for 5 years. It's been 10 years now, so Waze is finally getting sunset so that users can go back to Google Maps proper and Google can stop spending money maintaining two map apps. I'm sad, I still often prefer Waze over Google Maps, but it's not felt like the old Waze for a long time now.