Personally, I certainly never supposed that the current version of Apple's maps somehow proved that Apple had incompetent people on the problem. At the same ti

Personally, I certainly never supposed that the current version of Apple's maps somehow proved that Apple had incompetent people on the problem. At the same time, Apple has a carefully cultivated history of not shipping half-baked products. They famously worked on tablets for years before they built one that they were happy enough with to ship. Now, for reasons that the end user surely does not care about, they have taken a product that was missing a key feature or two (navigation, street view) and replaced it with something that is much less reliable even for its fundamental task. Yes, making a really good mapping application is hard, and requires many people on the ground, around the world. So either you need to make the commitment to do what it takes to deliver that app, or you should outsource the whole thing, and use Nokia Maps or Bing Maps or whatever. The third alternative -- doing it yourself and shipping it to end users before it's ready and without having done all the due diligence -- is likely to be embarrassing.