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There isn't really anything they could do. Even if they switched to a non-Apple geocoding service, it would still take over a week to get the new version of the

by lnanek2 12y ago

There isn't really anything they could do. Even if they switched to a non-Apple geocoding service, it would still take over a week to get the new version of the app approved, and by then the Apple service was working again. Such a service might even cost money, hurting their ability to keep working on the app, and might even be less reliable than Apple. Then you'll say they need to write support for multiple services, but that may not be worth it to save 3 days location search down time a year vs. some new feature users will use every day.

Someone 12y ago
Rereading it, it is ambiguous, but their wording ("I awoke to a deluge of user emails alerting us to this fact, and we quickly identified the culprit: Apple’s forward geocoding service was returning a 500 error code") gave me the impression that their app does not put up an informative error message, but instead "just didn't work", thus forcing the developer to spend time to figure out what was wrong. If my original impression is correct, there is something they could have done: code more defensively, and give precise error messages ("the server is there, but..."). It is a little thing, but it can mean the difference between a deluge and 'just' a large flow of emails.