Reportedly, Forstall wasn’t liked by the other senior execs but was kept “safe” as Jobs’ protégé, they thought alike and shared the love for skeuomorphism design. Ive in particular disliked Forstall, and Tim Cook made a choice.

https://www.businessinsider.com/apples-minimalist-ive-assume...

Forstall fired an engineer I had worked with (and who I respected a lot) to take the fall for Apple Maps.

> Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat".

Absolutely.

Was the choice to release way way way too early the right choice in the end? Needed telemetry, or even more time, to beat Google? Also taking the data from Google must have had significant ramifications.

The interface and the direction instructions on Apple Maps are way ahead of Google Maps. The app performance is also much smoother / snappier, it connects to the car instantly and reliably, where with Android Auto it’been always waiting and pain. But the accuracy of maps is indeed worse.

However my biggest gripe with Apple Maps in Poland is that Siri does not understand Polish and cannot be told to navigate to a Polish address. It just can’t understand the street and city names :(

Btw: I haven’t counted the times Google Maps wanted me to go through the worst possible traffic jam (where the traffic jam was not visible on the map) or a closed road. I guess it just happens with every navigation system that errors happen.

This may just be my bubble, but even among my iPhone-owning friends, I haven't seen a single person use Apple Maps in Europe, so I wouldn't be surprised if the efforts to improve the map data have been more focused on the US.

Anecdotal evidence, but I do use Apple Maps in Poland and they work just fine for me, I guess the mileage may vary.

I'm using almost exclusively Apple Maps in Poland and never had any issue (that I remember). Your mileage may vary and so on.

I made the mistake of trusting Google Maps with driving directions in Sicily, and it always sent me down tiny single lane (but two way) roads because they were "better" by the algorithm. That taught me to trust my gut and follow the highways/main roads rather than use any shortcuts that an algorithm can conjure up. (I'm sure this has relevance in the age of LLMs).

Personally I doubt they test the hardware outside an air conditioned and dust less office in California.

Years ago I went to WWDC, to the sessions where you could talk to specialists from their different libraries. I talked to someone high up in maps and location services, reporting an issue we were consistently seeing in geolocation at a particular spot in the world. They effectively told me they didn’t believe me and that it works fine for them.

Well, even generally much better Google maps sometimes tries to force me through unpaved field roads with unavoidable damage to normal cars. Or create absolutely ridiculous 'shortcuts' that save 5 metres but I should exit busy main road to join it again 100m later, spending few minutes trying to join back. Or lead me through forbidden/one way roads from wrong direction that are like that permanently since forever.

Generally they are fine, but not literally in every aspect in every place, Europe or not.

Very regionally dependent.

Around here (Long Island, New York, USA), it’s better than Google Maps. I get to compare a lot, because I have a friend that uses GM, and constantly sends me Google Maps universal links.

I hear that it is a lot less effective in rural areas, though, and I think Google Street View is better than the Apple variant.

It's been some years now, but apple maps put me into a loop once in Branson, Missouri.

It drove me around a couple miles that went right back to the intersection where we started, and then wanted me to start the loop again.

Apple Maps only works well in North America, possibly just the US. The same way a lot of happy paths in Apple products are designed for California/Single Culture/Single Language/Single Residence.

if you want to be EU-patriotic, you can try the Czech app Mapy.com. it's based on OSM data as well and at least for hiking in Europe it's the best

It is the case in regions where Apple gathers their own map data from scratch, instead of relying on data licensed from TomTom and others.

These reports seem unhelpful unless you specify the date at which you had this experience, as this thread is about continuous improvement over time.

Another huge exemple : in most big cities in Europe you have special parking lots around big public transit hubs outside of the city where you can park for free as long as you continue your journey by public transit.

In a lot of cities, that’s either the fastest or the most comfortable way to go somewhere in the city when you come from the outside.

Not any single navigation app support this (tbf, the few European ones don’t support it either)

I'm in the US and it is far from amazing for me.

To get to my home you take an exit off a toll road and where the exit splits continuing straight or going to the right you continue straight to a stop light where you take a left and in 1/4 mile take a right into my neighborhood. Apple Maps will tell you to go to the right instead of going straight merging on the road and continuing through 2 stop lights, taking a u-turn at a 3rd light and then backtracking to take the right into my neighborhood. Google Maps gives the correct directions.

In the closest major city Apple Maps will give directions instructing you to perform u-turns on streets where u-turns are legal but practically impossible. Google Maps will instead correctly direct you so such risky u-turns are not needed and you actually arrive quicker.

That is just two examples. I have many more I could provide.

My favorite Apple example of this is that when the Apple Watch notices that you're walking/running/biking and asks if you want to start a workout, for some reason you cannot accept it with the double-tap-your-fingers gesture. Which is fine if it's warm outside...but when it's winter in Minnesota, if I want to activate it I have to take one of my gloves off, pull up my sleeves, and put the gloves back on, while bitching about how nobody designing the watch lives in a cold climate. (Especially when I'm on a bike. Riding no-hands in the snow is not a smart idea.)

Staying in a holiday rental and there are no hooks on the walls!

Another example: When taking HOV and the map asks you if you want HOV enabled, there are no options I can force the navigation to take me to the nearest HOV lane.

If it happens to be there, it will say to use it, but I can't say "Route me to the nearest HOV entrance" because I prefer it even if it's 1 minute slower.

> staying in a regular hotel room and realizing there’s no light in front of the mirror, only behind you.

I'll bite, what does this have to do with Apple Maps?

> It shipped anyway.

“Real artists ship”

No product worth using is bug free.

I mean the problem was the Google contract, yeah?

It’s gotten a lot better, but I still find the address database better in Google Maps, which helps when you have only a fragment of an address. I also find that the Apple Maps database has a lot of roads that read the same. For instance, in Texas where I live, we have a lot of “Ranch Roads” that are numbered. Think of them like state highways in other state (which we also have; don’t ask). For whatever reason, most of the Ranch Roads are spoken by Maps as “Ranch Road,” not with the number. So, if you have a spot where multiple Ranch Roads intersect, Maps will just say “turn left on Ranch Road” instead of “turn left on Ranch Road 123.” It’s tremendous annoying. In another state, imagine it saying “turn left on Interstate,” without a number. Anyway, Google Maps does better.

On macOS there are so many basic things you’d want to do - share itineraries, annotate places, keep lists of things, but there’s not even a document concept. With the exception of guides, anything you do is ephemeral. It’s excellent at planning a route, but doing anything with that route, including getting back to it later is useless.

Maybe elsewhere it is. Here, it's terrible.

In general, for all it benefits from globalization, Apple disappoints on global markets.

In the US. In many other countries it's borderline useless.

It’s okay. It’s still subpar and barely keeping pace with Gmaps

I haven't used google maps in years.

90% of my usage of it is because it actually displays the map on my Watch, whereas Google Maps & Citymapper only show directions.

If it weren't for that, I'd use Citymapper for practically everything.

And they just added ads.

it was far inferior to its competitor when it was released

Apple software is unusable in india, no one uses it coz it has terrible data and thus the data never gets changed coz no one uses it. i have gotten wrong timings for gyms, wrong routes, it won't detect my home address from my contacts etc etc always find it funny when americans say "it's good now", no brother they fixed all the glitches in states it's still launch apple maps trash in india