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Nah. I don't agree with the premise of this article. This was not one person's decision. Many actors had to be involved in the decision making process. For

Nah. I don't agree with the premise of this article. This was not one person's decision. Many actors had to be involved in the decision making process. For some reason Apple decided that kicking Google off the platform was worth the abuse they'd have to endure with Maps. Those who keep saying "Maps is great" need to leave an egocentric view and realize that there are millions of users all around the world with different experiences. According to the apology letter they serve about 500 million searches in one week. That means two billion searches per month. What does this mean in therms of customer experience? http://www.mtonic.com/applemaps/ http://www.mtonic.com/applemaps/ According to this either 60% of the locations either incorrect or missing altogether. I'll be generous and propose that Maps, world-wide, might have an average of 5% incorrect or missing locations. I don't know if this is too low or too high. It's just a number that I pulled out of my imagination in order to get a sense of proportion. If only 5% of the data is wrong and we have two billion searches per month, that means 100 million bad searches per month. I'll let the reader guess as to how many users that affects. It certainly is in the millions. If data errors are larger than that the situation is far worst. Again, I'll leave it up to the reader to guess as to how much user anger would trigger Apple to post an apology letter on the front page of their site. If you live here in California, and, in particular, the Bay Area, please refrain from posting how "Maps is great and it is beautiful". You do not represent the experience of the vast majority of users who had almost no issues whatsoever with Google Maps. Oh, yes, on the whole "Maps is beautiful" mantra. Who the f* cares? 3D view? Who the f* cares? First make them dead accurate, then add eye candy if it makes sense. Accuracy is far more important than bling when it comes to maps. Nobody is going to want to use a beautiful map that takes you to the wrong place. And 3D view. Really? Get it right first. Then play.

pilsetnieks 14y ago
Everybody knows by now that the maps are no good. I think that at this point the rage and anger is about overpromising and knowingly shipping an unfinished product of insufficient quality, something Apple has never (arguably) done before. As it says in the article, the same could be applied to Siri but Siri came with the "beta" warning label, a lot of people understand that voice recognition and that kind of pseudo-AI is really hard, and it was better than anything competitors had to offer, which, obviously, is not the case with maps.
- pmjordan 14y ago
  ...something Apple has never (arguably) done before. Well, pretty much every 10.x.0 OSX release has had some nasty regressions in it, but they're generally not quite as easy to spot as the maps fiasco. What's worse is that this isn't a new product that starts off a bit crap with the view of improving it over time - there have been a few examples of these as well. Instead, from the users' point of view, the maps update falls plainly into the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" category. Users don't give a damn about contracts between Apple and Google. The Maps app has been there since iPhoneOS 1.0 and it's not had any drastic changes since then, despite its tremendous popularity. I find it baffling that they didn't release the new map material as an extra mode with more features (3D, turn by turn navigation), in addition to Google's map material for the classic 2D view until iOS7 comes along. That would probably have completely avoided the problem and given Apple an extra year to get their data into shape. The new features, although a little half-baked, would still have been seen as an improvement by users, whereas now they're just blinded by the seething rage of having the core functionality yanked out underneath them.
  - nachteilig 14y ago
    I really disagree with your views of the "ain't broke" area. For me and a lot of users it _was_ broken, because it had tiles that didn't zoom properly with a slow connection and didn't have turn by turn. Maps was falling behind, especially with the lack of turn by turn. Even my non-technical friends have been wondering when iOS would finally catch up with Android on that front.
    - esolyt 14y ago
      >Even my non-technical friends have been wondering when iOS would finally catch up with Android on that front. And it did now?
      - nachteilig 14y ago
        For turn by turn? Sure, for the most part. Probably the only downside is that Apple's location database hasn't yet caugh up with Google's.
leif 14y ago
"If only 5% of the data is wrong, and we have 2 billion searches per month, that means 100 million ..." Please go back to stats class.
- mmcnickle 14y ago
  Please leave more useful comments and explain the supposed error.
  - nfg 14y ago
    Well off the top of my head it'd be assuming that searches were distributed randomly w.r.t bad data, whereas in all likelihood there may be some (inverse) relationship between the badness of an area and its search popularity. In general living outside the US I was happy with the gmaps solution generally, apple maps had some glaring errors in my neck of the woods on launch.
  - leif 14y ago
    it assumes uniform search distribution
    - robomartin 14y ago
      Oh, please! There's no way to get the data required to do any real statistics work on this. Not without doing a hell of a lot more work than is worth for an HN post. My simplistic 5% = 100 million calc serves to simply highlight that small numbers can mean huge problems. Even if I am off by an order of magnitude this is still a huge number of searches per month that are potentially sending people to entirely the wrong place, if at all. Relax.
CamperBob2 14y ago
Those who keep saying "Maps is great" need to leave an egocentric view and realize that there are millions of users all around the world with different experiences. I have a theory about these people -- they are the ones who never realized that you could search Maps for place names. If you search for street addresses, both Maps implementations perform OK. But the strength of Google's database is that you can type almost anything within reason into the Maps search box and get where you want to go. For my first few weeks of iPhone usage, whenever I wanted to find a nearby "Starbucks" or "Barnes and Noble" or $name_of_local_restaurant, I'd do the search in Safari, pick a likely result, and then click on the page's address link, assuming there was one, in order to open it in Maps. Eventually I realized that I could type the search string directly into Maps, and that made life a lot easier. If that stopped working or became less effective on the iPhone that I use for navigation in the car, I would scream bloody murder. So my guess is that the people who aren't complaining about Apple's maps application are either living in metro areas that were carefully vetted by the data provider, searching for street addresses directly, or both.
- voxmatt 14y ago
  I'm not trying to apologize for Apple's mess -- and it is a mess -- but your theory doesn't hold for me. Some places are genuinely fine: I'm in San Francisco and the maps really are pretty damn good (in SF, I'll actually use the word good). Of course, this is right in Apple's back yard, but the reports seem to indicate that most major U.S. cities are in good shape (mind you, I'm talking about maps & places, not flyover's 3D views, which are a whole different story). And, I legitimately find the link to Yelp's reviews more useful than Google's place markings, but Google's are more consistently available. Not to say that this isn't a huge mess, but simply that there are places where "Maps is good" ("Maps is great" is a bit much no matter where you are!).
  - glenra 14y ago
    I've heard from a few sources that "Maps is great" is actually accurate in China - it's supposedly much better than before. This blog has examples http://anthonydrendel.com/ http://anthonydrendel.com/ (Though I had less luck with Hong Kong. For instance, a search for "Big Buddha, Lantau Island, Hong Kong" and every likely English variant just finds the middle of Lantau Island, not the Buddha itself.)
ams6110 14y ago
You are assuming that both the bad map data and the searches are evenly distributed across all locations. If their data are good in the most-searched areas, the number of users affected is much smaller.
- rustynails77 14y ago
  There are enough articles that re-enforce that Apple Maps (in its current incarnation) are sorely lacking, even in popular areas... A few examples, - Park Hyatt Tokyo - Tokyo Railway Station (the MAIN station) - Paddington Station in London - Melbourne Aus and Frankfurt Germany Airport roads - Hong Kong is misplaced http://www.ausbt.com.au/6-reasons-travellers-should-be-wary-of-apple-maps-in-ios-6 http://www.ausbt.com.au/6-reasons-travellers-should-be-wary-... The list goes on across the net. I support several other posters in that only an Apple fan would say that the maps are good overall. All you will hear from these people is how TomTom had a bad map 5 years ago, or how Garmin is missing a 3 year old suburb in their area. The fact is that in this instance, Apple stuffed up severely. It was a brave decision of Apple to go ahead with this version of maps - they would have known full well just how bad it was. Maybe it's the kick in the butt that Apple needed to catch up quickly. I expect that within 6 months, the situation will be a lot better for Apple.
ralfd 14y ago
> According to this either 60% of the locations either incorrect or missing altogether. This test makes a bad comparison. See here: http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591169 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591169
Codhisattva 14y ago
"Nah. I don't agree with the premise of this article. This was not one person's decision." Except in any corporation there is always one person who says "Ship it" and it does - regardless of anyone else's point of view. Was that Forstall? Most likely.
nikcub 14y ago
I can't imagine that the decision to drop Google early was made by the executive committee without getting a sign-off from Forstall that they would be ready with a new Maps app. The ordering in making that fateful Google decision must have been first to decide if their own alternative was going to be close to ready. At that point somebody aggregated the data from the Maps team and made a forecast that said they would be. Further, the failure of Maps has made iOS 6 itself a failure. You can tell from the marketing materials that the new Maps application was the headline feature of iOS 6. You can reverse engineer their thinking - we are dropping Google so this new release of the OS needs something special to hold it up. That 'something special' was the 3D view. People are forgetting that Maps was marketed as a better application than Google Maps. So that leaves a few points where it went wrong: a) whoever provided the input to the group that decided to drop Google in saying that they would be ready b) whoever decided to drop Google based on that info c) whoever was responsible for delivering the finished Maps product d) whoever was responsible for pinning the success of iOS 6 on Maps e) whoever was responsible for testing Maps f) whoever was responsible for raising user expectation by marketing Maps and iOS 6 as being 'better' and 'the best' As head of iOS and a member of the exec committee, a lot of those paths lead back to Forstall.
glenra 14y ago
> According to this either 60% of the locations either incorrect or missing altogether. According to a followup article ( http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps ) the old Maps app fails this exact test at least as badly. It just fails a bit differently. Whereas the new Maps app often says it can't find anything, the old one would for a similarly sized group of searches silently err on the side of finding a match that was wrong.
- ars 14y ago
  It only failed when he left out the country name from the search. Once he added the country name the new map barely changed, but the new one got dramatically better. The problem is very simple: The same city name shows in in multiple countries and the old map just didn't know which one he wanted.
kalid 14y ago
I really don't get the "Maps are great for me" apologists either. It reads like "Typhoon in Japan? Looked outside, weather is great here." I'm sure TomTom and Apple cleaned up the data for areas where their programmers and bosses live. Even in Seattle, I searched for "Pizza" and it didn't find the place down the street [I had to search for "Pizzareia" for it to show up]. When you see reports of major airports being missing or mislocated, you can't use the "Well my local airport shows up fine" defense. It's like an inverse Tu Quoque fallacy [you hit a problem, I didn't, therefore the problem isn't there].

pilsetnieks 14y ago

Everybody knows by now that the maps are no good. I think that at this point the rage and anger is about overpromising and knowingly shipping an unfinished product of insufficient quality, something Apple has never (arguably) done before. As it says in the article, the same could be applied to Siri but Siri came with the "beta" warning label, a lot of people understand that voice recognition and that kind of pseudo-AI is really hard, and it was better than anything competitors had to offer, which, obviously, is not the case with maps.

pmjordan 14y ago
...something Apple has never (arguably) done before. Well, pretty much every 10.x.0 OSX release has had some nasty regressions in it, but they're generally not quite as easy to spot as the maps fiasco. What's worse is that this isn't a new product that starts off a bit crap with the view of improving it over time - there have been a few examples of these as well. Instead, from the users' point of view, the maps update falls plainly into the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" category. Users don't give a damn about contracts between Apple and Google. The Maps app has been there since iPhoneOS 1.0 and it's not had any drastic changes since then, despite its tremendous popularity. I find it baffling that they didn't release the new map material as an extra mode with more features (3D, turn by turn navigation), in addition to Google's map material for the classic 2D view until iOS7 comes along. That would probably have completely avoided the problem and given Apple an extra year to get their data into shape. The new features, although a little half-baked, would still have been seen as an improvement by users, whereas now they're just blinded by the seething rage of having the core functionality yanked out underneath them.
- nachteilig 14y ago
  I really disagree with your views of the "ain't broke" area. For me and a lot of users it _was_ broken, because it had tiles that didn't zoom properly with a slow connection and didn't have turn by turn. Maps was falling behind, especially with the lack of turn by turn. Even my non-technical friends have been wondering when iOS would finally catch up with Android on that front.
  - esolyt 14y ago
    >Even my non-technical friends have been wondering when iOS would finally catch up with Android on that front. And it did now?
    - nachteilig 14y ago
      For turn by turn? Sure, for the most part. Probably the only downside is that Apple's location database hasn't yet caugh up with Google's.

leif 14y ago

"If only 5% of the data is wrong, and we have 2 billion searches per month, that means 100 million ..." Please go back to stats class.

mmcnickle 14y ago
Please leave more useful comments and explain the supposed error.
- nfg 14y ago
  Well off the top of my head it'd be assuming that searches were distributed randomly w.r.t bad data, whereas in all likelihood there may be some (inverse) relationship between the badness of an area and its search popularity. In general living outside the US I was happy with the gmaps solution generally, apple maps had some glaring errors in my neck of the woods on launch.
- leif 14y ago
  it assumes uniform search distribution
  - robomartin 14y ago
    Oh, please! There's no way to get the data required to do any real statistics work on this. Not without doing a hell of a lot more work than is worth for an HN post. My simplistic 5% = 100 million calc serves to simply highlight that small numbers can mean huge problems. Even if I am off by an order of magnitude this is still a huge number of searches per month that are potentially sending people to entirely the wrong place, if at all. Relax.

CamperBob2 14y ago

Those who keep saying "Maps is great" need to leave an egocentric view and realize that there are millions of users all around the world with different experiences. I have a theory about these people -- they are the ones who never realized that you could search Maps for place names. If you search for street addresses, both Maps implementations perform OK. But the strength of Google's database is that you can type almost anything within reason into the Maps search box and get where you want to go. For my first few weeks of iPhone usage, whenever I wanted to find a nearby "Starbucks" or "Barnes and Noble" or $name_of_local_restaurant, I'd do the search in Safari, pick a likely result, and then click on the page's address link, assuming there was one, in order to open it in Maps. Eventually I realized that I could type the search string directly into Maps, and that made life a lot easier. If that stopped working or became less effective on the iPhone that I use for navigation in the car, I would scream bloody murder. So my guess is that the people who aren't complaining about Apple's maps application are either living in metro areas that were carefully vetted by the data provider, searching for street addresses directly, or both.

voxmatt 14y ago
I'm not trying to apologize for Apple's mess -- and it is a mess -- but your theory doesn't hold for me. Some places are genuinely fine: I'm in San Francisco and the maps really are pretty damn good (in SF, I'll actually use the word good). Of course, this is right in Apple's back yard, but the reports seem to indicate that most major U.S. cities are in good shape (mind you, I'm talking about maps & places, not flyover's 3D views, which are a whole different story). And, I legitimately find the link to Yelp's reviews more useful than Google's place markings, but Google's are more consistently available. Not to say that this isn't a huge mess, but simply that there are places where "Maps is good" ("Maps is great" is a bit much no matter where you are!).
- glenra 14y ago
  I've heard from a few sources that "Maps is great" is actually accurate in China - it's supposedly much better than before. This blog has examples http://anthonydrendel.com/ http://anthonydrendel.com/ (Though I had less luck with Hong Kong. For instance, a search for "Big Buddha, Lantau Island, Hong Kong" and every likely English variant just finds the middle of Lantau Island, not the Buddha itself.)

ams6110 14y ago

You are assuming that both the bad map data and the searches are evenly distributed across all locations. If their data are good in the most-searched areas, the number of users affected is much smaller.

rustynails77 14y ago
There are enough articles that re-enforce that Apple Maps (in its current incarnation) are sorely lacking, even in popular areas... A few examples, - Park Hyatt Tokyo - Tokyo Railway Station (the MAIN station) - Paddington Station in London - Melbourne Aus and Frankfurt Germany Airport roads - Hong Kong is misplaced http://www.ausbt.com.au/6-reasons-travellers-should-be-wary-of-apple-maps-in-ios-6 http://www.ausbt.com.au/6-reasons-travellers-should-be-wary-... The list goes on across the net. I support several other posters in that only an Apple fan would say that the maps are good overall. All you will hear from these people is how TomTom had a bad map 5 years ago, or how Garmin is missing a 3 year old suburb in their area. The fact is that in this instance, Apple stuffed up severely. It was a brave decision of Apple to go ahead with this version of maps - they would have known full well just how bad it was. Maybe it's the kick in the butt that Apple needed to catch up quickly. I expect that within 6 months, the situation will be a lot better for Apple.

ralfd 14y ago

> According to this either 60% of the locations either incorrect or missing altogether. This test makes a bad comparison. See here: http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591169 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591169

Codhisattva 14y ago

"Nah. I don't agree with the premise of this article. This was not one person's decision." Except in any corporation there is always one person who says "Ship it" and it does - regardless of anyone else's point of view. Was that Forstall? Most likely.

nikcub 14y ago

I can't imagine that the decision to drop Google early was made by the executive committee without getting a sign-off from Forstall that they would be ready with a new Maps app. The ordering in making that fateful Google decision must have been first to decide if their own alternative was going to be close to ready. At that point somebody aggregated the data from the Maps team and made a forecast that said they would be. Further, the failure of Maps has made iOS 6 itself a failure. You can tell from the marketing materials that the new Maps application was the headline feature of iOS 6. You can reverse engineer their thinking - we are dropping Google so this new release of the OS needs something special to hold it up. That 'something special' was the 3D view. People are forgetting that Maps was marketed as a better application than Google Maps. So that leaves a few points where it went wrong: a) whoever provided the input to the group that decided to drop Google in saying that they would be ready b) whoever decided to drop Google based on that info c) whoever was responsible for delivering the finished Maps product d) whoever was responsible for pinning the success of iOS 6 on Maps e) whoever was responsible for testing Maps f) whoever was responsible for raising user expectation by marketing Maps and iOS 6 as being 'better' and 'the best' As head of iOS and a member of the exec committee, a lot of those paths lead back to Forstall.

glenra 14y ago

> According to this either 60% of the locations either incorrect or missing altogether. According to a followup article ( http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps http://vore.cc/post/32503374905/old-maps-vs-new-maps ) the old Maps app fails this exact test at least as badly. It just fails a bit differently. Whereas the new Maps app often says it can't find anything, the old one would for a similarly sized group of searches silently err on the side of finding a match that was wrong.

ars 14y ago
It only failed when he left out the country name from the search. Once he added the country name the new map barely changed, but the new one got dramatically better. The problem is very simple: The same city name shows in in multiple countries and the old map just didn't know which one he wanted.

kalid 14y ago

I really don't get the "Maps are great for me" apologists either. It reads like "Typhoon in Japan? Looked outside, weather is great here." I'm sure TomTom and Apple cleaned up the data for areas where their programmers and bosses live. Even in Seattle, I searched for "Pizza" and it didn't find the place down the street [I had to search for "Pizzareia" for it to show up]. When you see reports of major airports being missing or mislocated, you can't use the "Well my local airport shows up fine" defense. It's like an inverse Tu Quoque fallacy [you hit a problem, I didn't, therefore the problem isn't there].