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Apple Maps Might Start Showing Ads
- callc 2y agoI’m not Apple fanboy by any stretch, and I use Google maps, but Apple/Google maps are so valuable to my life, in the purist definition of valuable. Directions (garmin), finding businesses and places (yellow pages), pinning places (like a big map on the wall with pins), trip time estimation, etc I’m amazed by these extremely good products being free and mostly not covered in ads.
- jeffbee 2y agoGoogle Maps has plenty of ads. All the square pins are paid placements.
- rvnx 2y agodespite the fact that a lot of the actual content is provided by users for free.
- talldayo 2y agoYou could really say the same about OpenStreetMaps being laundered for revenue.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 2y agoI don't see how this statement is related to my statement.
- rvnx 2y agoIt's about the fact whether ads are justified or not. If users provide the content for free, there are less good reasons to justify adding ads there.
- jeffbee 2y agoIf I make an edit on Google Maps and Google stores and serves my edit to the world in perpetuity, what is the relative fraction of value at any time t after my edit?
- rvnx 2y agoThe value comes from user-generated content, just like on Instagram—individual posts may not matter, but their collective contribution is what creates value.
- behnamoh 2y ago> I’m amazed by these extremely good products being free and mostly not covered in ads. Probably because people don't click on ads while using Apple/Google maps to drive somewhere. The app has one job: give me directions. I'm not interested in enshitification of these products. Plus, they already gather lots of data about you, which is more valuable than showing ads.
- Wistar 2y agoAlthough maps are very useful, for me it is the street view functionality that I find the most useful—especially if I am driving somewhere I have not been before. I can rehearse key points of the drive, see landmarks, exit numbers, and so on.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago> extremely good products being free All the Apple ecosystem is subsidized by the price of the iPhones and Macs. There is no excuse for putting ads in such expensive products. And it's one reason why I'm moving away from Apple but that's another story.
- monsieurgaufre 2y agoMoving to where? Thinking of moving away from Apple as well.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoI’m personally moving to the Fairphone with preinstalled e/os. A phone that I control, can repair, and has more privacy than the other OS is what I expected from Apple until the past decade where they decided that privacy was a joke.
- aykay55 2y agoIt's simply not wise when everybody owns an iPhone and leaving iMessage will lead to social ostracization.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoWhat are you moving to? Windows is worse. Android phones have various issues with privacy or security. Linux products aren’t anywhere near ready (compare battery life between system76 and a MacBook for example). There just isn’t enough competition.
- lern_too_spel 2y agoAndroid phones have fewer issues with privacy and security than Apple phones. You can install a fully offline mapping application on Android and have it be your default navigation app. Unlike with iOS (which tells Apple everything you've installed and run), you don't have to tell anyone you installed it, and also unlike iOS (which sends all GPS data to Apple), you don't have to tell anyone your GPS location. Apple marketing saying they care about privacy doesn't make it true.
- hosteur 2y agoWhat a bummer. It recently started being a good Map app. I guess apple is really starting to go down a bad path what with their AI stuff etc.
- behnamoh 2y agoI just tried OpenStreetMap and was awfully disappointed. It's "just a map". I can't click on businesses, bus stops, etc. to get extra information about them. It's more like a digital version of paper maps I used to have eons ago. People forget that what makes products "sticky" is the amount of stuff added to them by the users over the years.
- jchw 2y agoHow did you use OpenStreetMap? If you're just browsing it via the website, you can click the query button and then select a map item for more information. (Just to be clear, I am not suggesting the UX or data on OSM competes with Google Maps. But I did go and click on a Chase Bank near me and got the phone number and hours, just to be sure that I wasn't making anything up. There are OSM apps that provide a nicer experience including navigation features.)
- maxerickson 2y agoHistorically, the project has not focused on making openstreetmap.org an end user mapping tool. Good or bad, that's the history, it's shown a flat slippy map without much interaction. Features often do have additional information, but broadly speaking, it's pretty incomplete and wouldn't be comparable to Apple/Google maps. There's areas where the data is probably better than commercial maps, but that isn't the case on average.
- yborg 2y agoPeople forget that the purpose of a map is to show you where you are and how to get where you want to go.
- behnamoh 2y agoIt used to be, it's not anymore.
- Doctor_Fegg 2y agoYou tried openstreetmap.org. That isn’t a consumer mapping site, it’s the community site for the OSM project. The idea is that the data is published as open source for other apps/sites to build on.
- scosman 2y agoI love Apple Maps for navigation. Blows google maps out of the water. Clearer instructions. More awareness of lanes. Generally much better UX. However their business search is barely worth using. Frequently out of date. Missing hours. Reviews from yelp which are inferior to googles, and need to leave to app to browse. If they want to make ad revenue it will be on the search side and they have a long way to go.
- jeffbee 2y ago> More awareness of lanes It really makes you wonder if anyone who works on the driving directions of Google Maps has ever used the product. The two most maddening dysfunctions of their driving directions are 1) displaying and holding a waypoint that is unavoidable, such as "merge onto Highway Whatever" when there are no other options, and 2) holding a direction such as "take exit 42" until the very last moment, even when there is a choice to be made immediately afterward, where you really want guidance about whether to bear left or right at a divergence. Combine them both and you get Google Maps repeatedly telling you to do something you can't avoid at the time when it should have been telling you the next turn.
- hnlmorg 2y agoInteresting you say that because I’ve found their directions to be generally ok on UK roads. Not perfect but not terrible either. The best satnav I’ve ever had was whatever was built into my VW CC. I think it might have been TomTom-based. I loved pretty much every aspect of that satnav. In fact I loved pretty much every aspect of that car too.
- jeffbee 2y agoI remember well the satnav in my last VW. On the center panel of the instrument cluster it displayed accurate and useful diagrams of the next turn including the streets that you were supposed to pass, with less emphasis. I also recall that its voice prompts were very polite, such as "If possible and safe, make a U turn".
- notatoad 2y ago
- hnlmorg 2y agoI get Apple are looking at doing this tastefully but this is a slippery slope where bean-counters realise they can get extra revenue for little effort. Whereas the entire point of paying a premium for Apple products is that you don’t get subjected to any side hustles — except Apple upselling their own services and I’m honest not ok with that either. If I wanted my hardware to be subsidised by advertisers then I’d have stuck with Android.
- ryao 2y agoThey already started this slippery slope with the stocks application. I paid a premium for Apple hardware in part to not have this nonsense, yet they did it anyway after the fact. :/
- threetonesun 2y agoThe News app is less of a slippery slope and more like a vertical waterslide.
- Rohansi 2y agoUnlike every other company that does this you're paying the premium and they aren't even subsidizing the hardware costs.
- staplung 2y ago> Whereas the entire point of paying a premium for Apple products is that you don’t get subjected to any side hustles The App Store is already filled with paid search results.
- hnlmorg 2y agoI know. Hence this being a slippery slope. I could probably have made my point clearer though.
- School-Cotton 2y agoI don’t really use the App Store at all, so that bothers me less. I use maps almost every day.
- sethd 2y agoEnshittification strikes again.
- echelon_musk 2y agoWhen Maps was updated in the last 3 or 4 iOS updates to make the nearby search result list much larger it was obvious that ads were coming. The UX of "search for x nearby" has suffered because where as before you could fit ~2x as many results.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoOne thing I don’t get is how to do search for X near the thing I’ve clicked. It often resets to near me.
- wlesieutre 2y agoAfter you enter a search term there are two search choices in the list below, either “Nearby” or “Near area on your map”
- pushcx 2y agoAnd then when I pan the map, maybe 90% of the time it doesn't load new results for the visible area. It makes Apple Maps pretty unusable for finding things in unfamiliar areas.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoI guess this and other dark patterns, there’s no point to using Apple products after all. I was hoping the premium price gets you privacy - but what they’re giving is not so much privacy as much as a walled garden where THEY can violate your privacy and keep the wins for themselves.
- AJRF 2y agoIt already inadvertently does! The controls Apple has on "who can upload data to Maps" has been gamed for years. Type something like "Double Bedroom" in London - You get Booking.com SEO (MEO?) spam! I had to do some qualitative analysis of map results (don't ask) and we decided to drop it as a data partner - there are 10's of example of search terms like this for Apple Maps that I found without much effort! Apple seems to build things that are very fundamentally unsound - but pass surface inspection. The article at the top of HN right now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066953) is another great showcase of this flaw in Apples processes, the really don't go super deep on good software. Three other places this shows up - Gaming, Swift and Machine Learning. - Gaming: I have heard 3 times in the past 15 years that Apple have made some fundamental change to their OS to support Desktop class gaming like Windows has - and every time those efforts fall flat. Every time it happens they get huge amount of kudos and press, the effort fizzles out, then they do it again after a few years. - Swift: I have heard of two separate efforts to make Swift code bases work on Linux, both of which failed. Server support has died. They throw "support" libs over the wall, and don't fix them when they don't work. Swift UI is a canonical study in not spending enough time planning. - ML: People are getting excited about MLX at the moment, and I see it as a great mirror of what they do with Gaming - some shallowly supported, not fundamentally sound, passion project gets some steam, they make big announcement, effort dies in a year and shuffled under the carpet. And fans of Apple keep falling for it!
- k310 2y agoApple Maps always refers you to Yelp, which in the past extorted businesses for good ratings. I avoided them like the plague, so I can't say if they're any better. Or worse.
- dmart 2y agoGross. The slow intrusion of ads into more and more places might raise revenue a little bit, but tarnishes Apple's brand image. Apple News is already a revolting app, only somewhat saved by the fact that Google News is even worse. I've already decided that my personal line in the sand is when they replace the scenic screensavers on Apple TV with ads, something they're already toeing the line with in the newly added Peanuts screensavers. At that point Apple has lost the plot and I want nothing to do with their products anymore.
- unsnap_biceps 2y agoI'm in line with most of what you said, but I gotta disagree about the peanuts collab. I grew up with peanuts and I just love having it there on the tv.
- aykay55 2y agoThe peanuts collab is not an advertisement nor is it a collab. Apple purchased the rights to the Peanuts franchise years ago and they are using the characters as part of their product design. If they are advertising (which they are not), they are not receiving any money for it, and Apple themselves have nothing to capitalize on these "ads" considering there is no product being sold. The Peanuts movie had a weak response and nearly everybody has already watched the Peanuts animated shorts. So no, it is not advertising.
- staplung 2y agoWhen Apple built their Maps it was presumably easy to justify the cost because it was dangerous to stay reliant on Google for something so essential to mobile. But maintaining a useful map system has got to be fantastically expensive as well and it's hard to imagine that anyone is really buying an Apple device because of Maps. Therefore, ads of some variety are pretty much guaranteed.
- aykay55 2y agoThis argument would have worked except that Apple collects its map data largely from you, the iPhone user, without your knowledge or consent. For example, the live traffic data in Apple and Google maps is incredibly useful, except that they gather this data from aggregated motion and GPS data from users themselves. If you are driving and see through your app that there is traffic ahead, it is because Apple is tapping the phones of the drivers directly in front of you and uploading that data to a central server. So Apple is running their service off of the device you paid for and extracting without your knowledge or informed consent. Now, they plan to place ads into this service as well so that you can pay for the service with your data in two ways. Beyond this, Apple uses the location data of its hundreds of millions of users to identify paths like sidewalks, parking lots, etc. Essentially, as you walk/drive, you are drawing Apple's maps for them. Apple is taking this data from you for free without any compensation and largely without informing you. So now, it's clear Apple has been building out much of its map data with free labor, and they only send out their little envoy vehicles for data gathering in areas where they do not have enough free labor to do it for them.
- bdangubic 2y agogood thing is that absolutely no one will see these ads :)
- kernal 2y agoWhy are people outraged? Apple is an advertising company and in order to sustain their growth they need to expand and proliferate their advertising to all of their products.