>If Apple has fostered/encouraged multiple great mapping applications rather than promoting just one this situation might not have occurred. Of course, then the

>If Apple has fostered/encouraged multiple great mapping applications rather than promoting just one this situation might not have occurred. Of course, then they'd have multiple mapping apps and users might be confused. Apple could have done this from the beginning... if they didn't rely on Google's data. That would have really opened up the market for quality map applications. The hard part of any maps application isn't necessarily presenting the data to the user. What really counts is your backend's data. Right now, Google is pretty much the king of that data, which is why everything that used their data, even Apple's old app, was pretty good. Honestly, I don't know how Apple could have come out looking good with the new maps. Even if it had been in development for years, it wouldn't have been nearly as full featured, or as good as implementations based on Google Maps. Apple's simply too far behind to come out swinging.