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The native iOS 6 Maps are just short of wretched. No transit directions, unhelpful default views, a dramatically weaker points of interest database, weaker scro

by jpxxx 14y ago

The native iOS 6 Maps are just short of wretched. No transit directions, unhelpful default views, a dramatically weaker points of interest database, weaker scrolling performance, and a busier UI that doesn't add anything of great use. It's a rather big turd in an otherwise delicious punchbowl, and it is going to become a real-world talking point about iPhones starting today.

randomdata 14y ago
I shared many of those concerns from the previews given by Apple. That is until I actually tried using it, at which point I have deemed it much better than the Google-backed version. With that said, I think your location matters: Transit directions are not something I can use anyway, for instance.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
I saw someone tweet (and someone I follow retweet) this: "Nine years ago Safari was released: a fringe browser that didn't run sites for IE well. Today, its engine powers everything. Now think maps." I laughed and then felt really, really bad for them. It's unbelievable the way people react to criticism. (in any cases, not just Apple/iPhone)
- jpxxx 14y ago
  Trojankitten is extraordinarily astute and her opinion is not to be dismissed as partisanship. She is correct in that Maps are a fundamental and incredibly important platform service that will only become moreso over time. Doesn't change how much they suck today, though.
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    I have no idea who this person is other than guessing she is a female from her profile picture. It's also not the first tweet I've found to be completely off-base and ironically, the second today. The tweet about intro/extrovertedness is just flatly wrong. I have no reason to take her tweet as anything but what it is. In context with her other tweets, I feel pretty damn safe in calling it at least a bit partisan. A quick scan of the first above-the fold tweets shows another conversation that is blatantly intentionally down-playing the badness of the iOS6 maps. edit: I mean, I haven no stake in this, as I've said I have no idea who this person is, but you can't read through that feed and tell me with an honest tone that it's not biased. It's blatantly pro-Apple tweet, anti-Google tweet, ambiguous tweet about Microsoft competing with Google. Repeat. edit2: I've devolved into an off-topic rant about some random Twitter account. I apologize. I'll merely conclude that likening iOS6 Maps to Safari (and really WebKit) as a response to how bad Maps is... is pretty desperate in my opinion.
    - jpxxx 14y ago
      Yes it's biased, she's deeply opinionated, yes she's an opinioneer, etc... But she's still got a piece of the truth in hand: Maps are important, they're only becoming moreso, and Apple is extremely unlikely to sit on their ass now that they've launched their own stack. (especially once their customer satisfaction numbers start plopping, which they will)
      - drivebyacct2 14y ago
        Now that is a much more palatable and understandable angle. I completely agree that it makes sense for Apple to take it in house. I completely sympathize that is a monumental (literally, World-sized) problem to tackle and that for a first-release, this is probably admirable of Apple. I guess I still don't buy that Apple Maps are going to become the ubiquitous success that WebKit is. There's one of two implications at hand: 1. It will be the best thing ever because Apple made it (which makes me immensely sad and is why I groaned at this tweet). 2. It will become a staple used by everyone like WebKit. I don't see any chance of #2 happening as that would require Apple to license that data, or make it a service, or a reusable component for others to use. I can't think of anything that Apple does so with currently, nor any movement from them to make that seem like a logical choice. Thus, again, I'm left wondering where on Earth someone comes up with correlating iOS6 Maps and WebKit.
        glhaynes 14y ago
        I don't think her point is that it's going to get used in lots of other projects but that it will grow to be a big success, and one that people will look back on and say "Apple was right to set off on this weird-seeming path back then." We'll see, of course. (I say this as somebody that was shocked that Apple didn't build Safari 1.0 on top of Mozilla/Gecko. KHTML?!)
        drivebyacct2 14y ago
        I mean, in that regard I hope she's right. I hope that Apple brings Google Maps some serious competition and obviously, for my iOS breathren, I hope that their maps experience continues to be enhanced. But we all know that, right? Maybe this was just a response to "iOS Maps sux. Apple sux." type comments? I'm not sure. It's hard for me to believe how polar peoples' opinions still are on iOS and Android to have to have these silly conversations.
  - mikeash 14y ago
    If it doesn't change how much they suck today, then why do people keep bringing it up in response to complaints about how much they suck today? I can understand speculating that the new maps will get better, but I don't understand why that's being used as a response to people talking about how terrible they are now.
- kbutler 14y ago
  I'd say the 2005 open source release of WebKit was a necessary precondition for "Today its engine powers everything." Is there any reason to expect a similar direction for Apple with maps?
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    Besides it not being open source, etc? Also, it seems very misguided to use "Safari was released. [Safari] became successful."... to imply that "AnythingElse was released. AnythingElse will become successful." Literally pick any product that has ever not become a rousing success and you have plenty of counter-examples as to why that logic is faulty at best. I still also find it be evidence of pandering to go out of the way to say "Safari is a success" rather than "WebKit". The sentiment of the tweet isn't even remotely accurate for "Safari".
  - frabcus 14y ago
    Webkit was just Apple's fork of KHTML. The KDE Linux desktop people should get way more credit for having written the engine the powers Android's browser, Safari and Chrome...
- mikeash 14y ago
  I've seen that response several times now, and it's incredibly bizarre. Why should a guess at the potential future impact evaluation of how the thing is right now?
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    Based on kbutler's response above, my other post detailing the two options I see and the fact that my "Uh, it's not open source?" comment is downvoted, I'm inclined to think that there are some here that believe "Apple release -> auto(eventual) success". I mean, as you say, what other basis is there for even making such a strange comparison between two vastly different projects (an open source rendering engine and a proprietary data set gained through partnerships and manual data gathering?
- masklinn 14y ago
  That one is not that bad, I just take it to mean a humble start can become a fantastic product. Now this one on the other hand, I can't figure out the state of mind leading to writing it and releasing that to the world: > What’s missing from this conversation is that map usage is critical. […] Google’s maps are going to start degrading. Apple’s will get better. They’ll meet in the middle within 18 months.
mullingitover 14y ago
Eh, I tried the new Maps and it seems usable. What's really wretched in this release is what they've done to the App Store. It's now HTML5-based, like the old (and despised) facebook app. It crawls compared to the old one.
- denkfaul 14y ago
  That doesn't sound good. The app store wasn't all that zippy to begin with on a new iPad, and became nearly unusable on an (admittedly aging) 3GS.
  - pooriaazimi 14y ago
    Unless I'm terribly mistaken, ALL apple stores (iTunes music, iOS App, Mac App, iBooks) on all platforms (Mac, WIndows, iOS) have always been web views. Every single one of them. Ever since 2002 when iTunes was launched. And my experience in the past few months (iPad 2, iOS 6 beta) was that the store is not slow at all, so don't worry!
- masklinn 14y ago
  > What's really wretched in this release is what they've done to the App Store. The appstore has always been web-based. You could really feel it on a slow connection (e.g. Edge), because the UI itself (not just the content) would take ages to display and sometimes fail to render altogether.
Zirro 14y ago
I haven't had time to explore it very much yet, but I was a bit disappointed when I first launched it and found that the only overhead imagery available for my area is in black and white. It's hardly a remote location. I suppose they will be making a lot of map-related deals over the coming months, but Google may have arranged exclusive contracts with some companies.
untog 14y ago
Honestly, I think this just showcases how difficult maps really are. No matter how bad people in the US are finding it, I guarantee that users outside the US are going to hate this change even more than you do. It's a great example of something that doesn't scale easily.
- brunnsbe 14y ago
  Yes, the map over Helsinki, Finland is full of errors like stores and restaurants being in totally wrong locations or just plain wrong (according to the map I have a bar I never have heard of on my iPad 200m from my house in the middle of a park).
arrrg 14y ago
I agree in general, but it isn’t all bad. (Recounting my experience on the Retina iPad:) At least on that device, performance now appears to be on par with the old app, much improved from earlier betas (but the new iPad is a pretty beefy device, other devices may struggle more). On bad connections, maps seem to load much better (because they are now vector based) and I do like their style – if it weren’t for the atrocious map data, I think the default view would be on par with the old app (I also have seen the styling of the maps and the placement algorithms for labels improve by leaps and bounds during beta testing). Turn-by-turn is really great and works very well. I have no complaints about the UI on the iPad, it’s more or less the same (though the changes they made might not works so well on smaller screens). (I’m in Germany, living in a small city with 50,000 inhabitants:) However, map data is atrocious and riddled with embarrassing mistakes (when zooming in, the label of my city is not visible for the longest time – while much smaller villages around my city appear much earlier – and when it finally becomes visible it’s about three kilometers east of my city, in some forest). Satellite images are embarrassingly bad. POIs are practically non-existent and useless in Germany. If they exist at all they are out of date (when I search for italian restaurants, it shows me a pizzeria that closed half a decade ago, not a single italian restaurant that is open now). Google’s POIs are current and (more or less) comprehensive, Apple’s are anything but. Plus: No one uses Yelp in Germany, Qype is pretty popular around here, though – consequently there is just no useful data on Yelp about German restaurants. I really hope that Google will soon come out with their maps app for iOS. And I hope that Apple will improve. I believe they can (hey, it took Google some time, too), and I don’t object to the existence of a second good maps service.
hnriot 14y ago
I suspect Google will release an IOS app putting back their functionality soon enough. I hope so because while the apple maps looks pretty, the utility comes from the search by point of interest, and that's considerably weakened by this release. There are a few improvements though, I like the new app store better because I don't need my password to update apps, or buy free ones, and the icon has a little 'new' badge to remind me to try the app.
- pdubs 14y ago
  > I don't need my password to update apps As an Android user who was recently given an iPad for work, this one step stopped me from installing probably 10-20 apps. I'd be on a site, think "oh there's probably an app for this", realize I'd have to type in my 15-character password, and think "oh...well using the website's ok I guess". It baffles me that it's been around for as long as it has.
astral303 14y ago
Apple needs to take their massive $$$ warchest and spend an inordinate amount of money on getting maps back up in shape. Each of those $'s is worth it. It's an absolutely crucial feature and it needs to be not just good enough, it needs to be really good and better than most. My fear is now Apple is becoming more bean counter and less passion, strong-opinion driven. To let Maps out in this shape is a troubling misstep.
- cooldeal 14y ago
  I think Amazon one-upped Apple on the maps front by licensing Navteq's maps (now owned by Nokia) for the Kindle tablets and wrapping a nice API around them for developers. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/18/amazon_google_map_bmrush/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/18/amazon_google_map_bm... Navteq's maps are way better than TomTom's. One of my friends had a TomTom GPS a few years ago and it was terrible, like once taking us around in circles for a restaurant and showing it was three miles away, when we could see it across the street a few hundred feet away. He had such bad experiences with it that he would borrow our Garmins and finally switched to Garmin a year ago. I just assumed that TomTom was Europe based so had much better coverage there and pretty horrible maps in the US. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/375415/how-satnav-maps-are-made http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/375415/how-satnav-maps-are-m... If I were Google, I would release a very polished maps app for iOS for $10 with ads, but they might be just content with some people picking Android phones just because the builtin maps experience and turn by turn voice directions is really good.
  - dazzawazza 14y ago
    My experience in the reverse and backs up your assumption: in the UK TomTom has MUCH better maps than my Garmin device.
- napierzaza 14y ago
  Hard to tell. Though ultimately I feel like their code quality HAS gone down lately. But the fact that the maps are not as polished seems more like possibly an issue where they didn't have enough time. It's not clear who terminated the deal with Google Maps. Apple's must get better, more of a question as to whether Apple will put the capital behind it to make it happen fast.
high5ths 14y ago
I was actually thrilled that for transit directions in NYC, Maps just gave me a button to the Embark app, which won the MTA App Quest for best subway navigation in the city. It has a better interface than Google Maps for transit, anyway. It's obviously an extra step to go to another app, but if the experience is better in the long run, I'm willing to go with it. Google Maps has been annoying on iOS for a while -- ever since they updated their Android app to use vectors, while ignoring the iOS version, it's felt much slower and I figured it was just a matter of time before they abandoned iOS completely.
- r00fus 14y ago
  You realize that Google Maps iOS app is an Apple product, right? They worked closely with Google, but it's not Google's code.
- untog 14y ago
  I was actually thrilled that for transit directions in NYC, Maps just gave me a button to the Embark app I don't understand how you can be thrilled about that. It's a link to the App Store, and represents one less option available to you.
purephase 14y ago
Turn-by-turn is great. If only Google could bring that out of Android-land and into their iOS app.

by jpxxx 14y ago

randomdata 14y ago

I shared many of those concerns from the previews given by Apple. That is until I actually tried using it, at which point I have deemed it much better than the Google-backed version. With that said, I think your location matters: Transit directions are not something I can use anyway, for instance.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

I saw someone tweet (and someone I follow retweet) this: "Nine years ago Safari was released: a fringe browser that didn't run sites for IE well. Today, its engine powers everything. Now think maps." I laughed and then felt really, really bad for them. It's unbelievable the way people react to criticism. (in any cases, not just Apple/iPhone)

jpxxx 14y ago
Trojankitten is extraordinarily astute and her opinion is not to be dismissed as partisanship. She is correct in that Maps are a fundamental and incredibly important platform service that will only become moreso over time. Doesn't change how much they suck today, though.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  I have no idea who this person is other than guessing she is a female from her profile picture. It's also not the first tweet I've found to be completely off-base and ironically, the second today. The tweet about intro/extrovertedness is just flatly wrong. I have no reason to take her tweet as anything but what it is. In context with her other tweets, I feel pretty damn safe in calling it at least a bit partisan. A quick scan of the first above-the fold tweets shows another conversation that is blatantly intentionally down-playing the badness of the iOS6 maps. edit: I mean, I haven no stake in this, as I've said I have no idea who this person is, but you can't read through that feed and tell me with an honest tone that it's not biased. It's blatantly pro-Apple tweet, anti-Google tweet, ambiguous tweet about Microsoft competing with Google. Repeat. edit2: I've devolved into an off-topic rant about some random Twitter account. I apologize. I'll merely conclude that likening iOS6 Maps to Safari (and really WebKit) as a response to how bad Maps is... is pretty desperate in my opinion.
  - jpxxx 14y ago
    Yes it's biased, she's deeply opinionated, yes she's an opinioneer, etc... But she's still got a piece of the truth in hand: Maps are important, they're only becoming moreso, and Apple is extremely unlikely to sit on their ass now that they've launched their own stack. (especially once their customer satisfaction numbers start plopping, which they will)
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      Now that is a much more palatable and understandable angle. I completely agree that it makes sense for Apple to take it in house. I completely sympathize that is a monumental (literally, World-sized) problem to tackle and that for a first-release, this is probably admirable of Apple. I guess I still don't buy that Apple Maps are going to become the ubiquitous success that WebKit is. There's one of two implications at hand: 1. It will be the best thing ever because Apple made it (which makes me immensely sad and is why I groaned at this tweet). 2. It will become a staple used by everyone like WebKit. I don't see any chance of #2 happening as that would require Apple to license that data, or make it a service, or a reusable component for others to use. I can't think of anything that Apple does so with currently, nor any movement from them to make that seem like a logical choice. Thus, again, I'm left wondering where on Earth someone comes up with correlating iOS6 Maps and WebKit.
      - glhaynes 14y ago
        I don't think her point is that it's going to get used in lots of other projects but that it will grow to be a big success, and one that people will look back on and say "Apple was right to set off on this weird-seeming path back then." We'll see, of course. (I say this as somebody that was shocked that Apple didn't build Safari 1.0 on top of Mozilla/Gecko. KHTML?!)
        drivebyacct2 14y ago
        I mean, in that regard I hope she's right. I hope that Apple brings Google Maps some serious competition and obviously, for my iOS breathren, I hope that their maps experience continues to be enhanced. But we all know that, right? Maybe this was just a response to "iOS Maps sux. Apple sux." type comments? I'm not sure. It's hard for me to believe how polar peoples' opinions still are on iOS and Android to have to have these silly conversations.
- mikeash 14y ago
  If it doesn't change how much they suck today, then why do people keep bringing it up in response to complaints about how much they suck today? I can understand speculating that the new maps will get better, but I don't understand why that's being used as a response to people talking about how terrible they are now.
kbutler 14y ago
I'd say the 2005 open source release of WebKit was a necessary precondition for "Today its engine powers everything." Is there any reason to expect a similar direction for Apple with maps?
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Besides it not being open source, etc? Also, it seems very misguided to use "Safari was released. [Safari] became successful."... to imply that "AnythingElse was released. AnythingElse will become successful." Literally pick any product that has ever not become a rousing success and you have plenty of counter-examples as to why that logic is faulty at best. I still also find it be evidence of pandering to go out of the way to say "Safari is a success" rather than "WebKit". The sentiment of the tweet isn't even remotely accurate for "Safari".
- frabcus 14y ago
  Webkit was just Apple's fork of KHTML. The KDE Linux desktop people should get way more credit for having written the engine the powers Android's browser, Safari and Chrome...
mikeash 14y ago
I've seen that response several times now, and it's incredibly bizarre. Why should a guess at the potential future impact evaluation of how the thing is right now?
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Based on kbutler's response above, my other post detailing the two options I see and the fact that my "Uh, it's not open source?" comment is downvoted, I'm inclined to think that there are some here that believe "Apple release -> auto(eventual) success". I mean, as you say, what other basis is there for even making such a strange comparison between two vastly different projects (an open source rendering engine and a proprietary data set gained through partnerships and manual data gathering?
masklinn 14y ago
That one is not that bad, I just take it to mean a humble start can become a fantastic product. Now this one on the other hand, I can't figure out the state of mind leading to writing it and releasing that to the world: > What’s missing from this conversation is that map usage is critical. […] Google’s maps are going to start degrading. Apple’s will get better. They’ll meet in the middle within 18 months.

mullingitover 14y ago

Eh, I tried the new Maps and it seems usable. What's really wretched in this release is what they've done to the App Store. It's now HTML5-based, like the old (and despised) facebook app. It crawls compared to the old one.

denkfaul 14y ago
That doesn't sound good. The app store wasn't all that zippy to begin with on a new iPad, and became nearly unusable on an (admittedly aging) 3GS.
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  Unless I'm terribly mistaken, ALL apple stores (iTunes music, iOS App, Mac App, iBooks) on all platforms (Mac, WIndows, iOS) have always been web views. Every single one of them. Ever since 2002 when iTunes was launched. And my experience in the past few months (iPad 2, iOS 6 beta) was that the store is not slow at all, so don't worry!
masklinn 14y ago
> What's really wretched in this release is what they've done to the App Store. The appstore has always been web-based. You could really feel it on a slow connection (e.g. Edge), because the UI itself (not just the content) would take ages to display and sometimes fail to render altogether.

Zirro 14y ago

I haven't had time to explore it very much yet, but I was a bit disappointed when I first launched it and found that the only overhead imagery available for my area is in black and white. It's hardly a remote location. I suppose they will be making a lot of map-related deals over the coming months, but Google may have arranged exclusive contracts with some companies.

untog 14y ago

Honestly, I think this just showcases how difficult maps really are. No matter how bad people in the US are finding it, I guarantee that users outside the US are going to hate this change even more than you do. It's a great example of something that doesn't scale easily.

brunnsbe 14y ago
Yes, the map over Helsinki, Finland is full of errors like stores and restaurants being in totally wrong locations or just plain wrong (according to the map I have a bar I never have heard of on my iPad 200m from my house in the middle of a park).

arrrg 14y ago

I agree in general, but it isn’t all bad. (Recounting my experience on the Retina iPad:) At least on that device, performance now appears to be on par with the old app, much improved from earlier betas (but the new iPad is a pretty beefy device, other devices may struggle more). On bad connections, maps seem to load much better (because they are now vector based) and I do like their style – if it weren’t for the atrocious map data, I think the default view would be on par with the old app (I also have seen the styling of the maps and the placement algorithms for labels improve by leaps and bounds during beta testing). Turn-by-turn is really great and works very well. I have no complaints about the UI on the iPad, it’s more or less the same (though the changes they made might not works so well on smaller screens). (I’m in Germany, living in a small city with 50,000 inhabitants:) However, map data is atrocious and riddled with embarrassing mistakes (when zooming in, the label of my city is not visible for the longest time – while much smaller villages around my city appear much earlier – and when it finally becomes visible it’s about three kilometers east of my city, in some forest). Satellite images are embarrassingly bad. POIs are practically non-existent and useless in Germany. If they exist at all they are out of date (when I search for italian restaurants, it shows me a pizzeria that closed half a decade ago, not a single italian restaurant that is open now). Google’s POIs are current and (more or less) comprehensive, Apple’s are anything but. Plus: No one uses Yelp in Germany, Qype is pretty popular around here, though – consequently there is just no useful data on Yelp about German restaurants. I really hope that Google will soon come out with their maps app for iOS. And I hope that Apple will improve. I believe they can (hey, it took Google some time, too), and I don’t object to the existence of a second good maps service.

hnriot 14y ago

I suspect Google will release an IOS app putting back their functionality soon enough. I hope so because while the apple maps looks pretty, the utility comes from the search by point of interest, and that's considerably weakened by this release. There are a few improvements though, I like the new app store better because I don't need my password to update apps, or buy free ones, and the icon has a little 'new' badge to remind me to try the app.

pdubs 14y ago
> I don't need my password to update apps As an Android user who was recently given an iPad for work, this one step stopped me from installing probably 10-20 apps. I'd be on a site, think "oh there's probably an app for this", realize I'd have to type in my 15-character password, and think "oh...well using the website's ok I guess". It baffles me that it's been around for as long as it has.

astral303 14y ago

Apple needs to take their massive $$$ warchest and spend an inordinate amount of money on getting maps back up in shape. Each of those $'s is worth it. It's an absolutely crucial feature and it needs to be not just good enough, it needs to be really good and better than most. My fear is now Apple is becoming more bean counter and less passion, strong-opinion driven. To let Maps out in this shape is a troubling misstep.

cooldeal 14y ago
I think Amazon one-upped Apple on the maps front by licensing Navteq's maps (now owned by Nokia) for the Kindle tablets and wrapping a nice API around them for developers. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/18/amazon_google_map_bmrush/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/18/amazon_google_map_bm... Navteq's maps are way better than TomTom's. One of my friends had a TomTom GPS a few years ago and it was terrible, like once taking us around in circles for a restaurant and showing it was three miles away, when we could see it across the street a few hundred feet away. He had such bad experiences with it that he would borrow our Garmins and finally switched to Garmin a year ago. I just assumed that TomTom was Europe based so had much better coverage there and pretty horrible maps in the US. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/375415/how-satnav-maps-are-made http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/375415/how-satnav-maps-are-m... If I were Google, I would release a very polished maps app for iOS for $10 with ads, but they might be just content with some people picking Android phones just because the builtin maps experience and turn by turn voice directions is really good.
- dazzawazza 14y ago
  My experience in the reverse and backs up your assumption: in the UK TomTom has MUCH better maps than my Garmin device.
napierzaza 14y ago
Hard to tell. Though ultimately I feel like their code quality HAS gone down lately. But the fact that the maps are not as polished seems more like possibly an issue where they didn't have enough time. It's not clear who terminated the deal with Google Maps. Apple's must get better, more of a question as to whether Apple will put the capital behind it to make it happen fast.

high5ths 14y ago

I was actually thrilled that for transit directions in NYC, Maps just gave me a button to the Embark app, which won the MTA App Quest for best subway navigation in the city. It has a better interface than Google Maps for transit, anyway. It's obviously an extra step to go to another app, but if the experience is better in the long run, I'm willing to go with it. Google Maps has been annoying on iOS for a while -- ever since they updated their Android app to use vectors, while ignoring the iOS version, it's felt much slower and I figured it was just a matter of time before they abandoned iOS completely.

r00fus 14y ago
You realize that Google Maps iOS app is an Apple product, right? They worked closely with Google, but it's not Google's code.
untog 14y ago
I was actually thrilled that for transit directions in NYC, Maps just gave me a button to the Embark app I don't understand how you can be thrilled about that. It's a link to the App Store, and represents one less option available to you.

purephase 14y ago

Turn-by-turn is great. If only Google could bring that out of Android-land and into their iOS app.