There is only ONE thing that a maps product absolutely has to get right, and that's the data. It's the core of the whole product.
It wasn't just some unlucky team working that went down the wrong path and produced a substandard product (Aperture or MobileMe), this was the outright replacement of a product that almost all iPhone users consider a core feature of their device and, at some point during their time with the device, depend on to help them in a confusing situation.
Yeah, well, maybe I'm the only one, but apple maps work fine for me. Massive improvement over the old maps experience. Google regularly got a ton of things wrong, even in urban areas like San Francisco, so I give Apple the benefit of the doubt when it comes to minor mistakes.
Then again, this whole discussion could be related to the fact that Apple users are about 985% more likely to nitpick a product than any other group of people on earth.
Then again, this whole discussion could be related to the fact that Apple users are about 985% more likely to nitpick a product than any other group of people on earth.
Or just that it was vastly wrong in a lot of places that weren't San Francisco. It was missing one of the two major train stations in Sydney for crying out loud.
Within a week of its launch, I used the product in three different cities and multiple less urban locations on the east and west coasts. I had no major problems.
I'm know there were problems with maps, but a lot of the teeth gnashing was/is exaggerated drama. Google routinely places silly things at the corner of Van Ness and Market, because it has no idea where they belong -- you just don't hear about it because nobody nitpicks Google Maps the way they did Apple's launch.
I beg to disagree. I was surprised that Apple Maps also get the information granularity completely wrong, that is the amount of data presented at a zoom level. This, and not the data, made the app uttterly unusable for me on a recent trip to Hong Kong. I could either see the overview of the area I was in with no street names for all the minor streets around me, which made it unusable. Or I could zoom in and finally see the smaller street names, but lose all overview. Also unusable.
It seems like they could have just copied Gmaps for that... I sure hope they fix it soon.
Try navigating Thailand without any English street names and descriptions. Nothing to do with the Maps language setting, everything to do with the data. Maybe it's been fixed now with a new data set?
There was only ONE thing Apple did wrong with Apple Maps. And that was to not license data far, far more aggressively.
The fact is that Google Maps as an app is buggy, lags terribly and clunky all round. It's the high quality of the data that sets it apart.