Fans rap Apple's 'crap' Map app Apple today faced the ire of thousands of irritated iOS 6 users who upgraded to the new version of the iDevice operating system only to discover the Cupertino's new Maps app is, well, pants. As we noted in our review of iOS 6 yesterday, Apple dropped Google's mapping system in favour of one of its own. The result is an …
They didn't include NFC because "it wasn't ready for prime time" but let it ship with this shit? Steve Jobs was a hypocritical thief, but at least he had standards - he'd either have stuck with Google until ready or pulled it all completely. He'd never have let this ship.
I'd say give it a month for the first batch to get out, then watch the real reviews as the backlash begins and the iSheep realise they've been screwed again and have to wait another full year till they get to even last years Android levels of functionality.
"One iPad owner who uses Google Maps for close-up viewing of archaeological sites said: 'With iOS 5, I had generally very good resolution, colour imagery of ancient sites, enough to see features not readily seen on the ground. Now the resolution is lower, so I can't zoom in to examine a feature so closely as before, and many areas are presented in black and white.'"
Using an iPad for viewing archaeological sites?
Fucking idiot.
I think the problem is in the wording of the article. Aerial photography is used extensively in identifying possible sites. For instance, there is often a noticeable difference between the shading of crops where there is something underneath. These patterns are very hard to see from the ground, but much easier to spot from above.
Charming: definitely not, but as an archaeologist I'm not going to vote shagbag down because he's sort of right. Certainly in temperate climes, commercial aerial photography is often ill-suited to archaeological sites because there is often a fairly small window of time to get a good snap of crop or soil marks. Low raking light, a light dusting of snow just on the melt, rainfall that happened a few hours or days before, just the right time after planting of certain cereal crops, are all good times to pick out the very subtle variations in soil and crop colour and drainage, but these conditions are generally not flown by commercial units when their brief is to capture a district or county - at least not deliberately.
It is also very inefficient to scroll around aerial photography on the off-chance of finding an anomaly that hasn't already been recorded, with a view to excavating it. The closest process that is used is one of inference: watchtower A is here and watchtower C is here, they're not intervisible, so putative watchtower B is probably somewhere here. But assuming permission and funding have been obtained, using an iPad on site to look at commercial photography would get you laughed off site, or at least accused of not doing your research beforehand.
I know you're joking there, but from watching the video there are some things that I prefer:
1) The navigation doesn't incessantly babble more instructions than necessary. I have used Google Navigation in Leeds and got to the point where I was shouting at my phone in the car and turning the air blue. Silencing the phone solved the problem, but it's not a secret these days that giving a driver excess information on a sat nav doesn't help and causes stress.
2) The navigation allows you to choose from alternative routes when you start.
While these are good points, I don't believe Steve Jobs would have let the product out in it's current form of readiness.
@Bob Vistakin "was is as good as this? http://goo.gl/amB1g"
Hahaha, no it was really pretty competent. :)
I had NO anti-android or "grass is greener" sentiment to my earlier message. I just acknowledge good ideas when I see them, no matter where they come from.
Someone else earlier said that Navigate did offer alternative routes, I never said it didn't. I just mentioned I liked them being options at the start.
Navigate never used to try and feed you info you didn't need, it was better when it just gave you the vitals. Going through Leeds, it was telling me what was coming up next at really inappropriate times.
... Feeling lost? Join owners of Apple iOS6 devices at Manchester United Football Club - just search for it on the new Google-free Apple Maps app and follow the directions given...
Feeling lost? Join owners of Apple iOS6 devices at Sale United Football Club, all wandering about trying to find Old Trafford stadium after they followed the directions from Maps...
Will Apple to perform a legal U-turn when possible over this? Nah, cos it's run by blokes... ;-)
I wonder what blocking would mean given that there are a large number of satnav apps on the iPhone too. How do you block access to google's service without blocking the others too and provoking an uproar?
Perhaps Apple believe that by the power of default will allow them to fix their crappy content over time or most users are so ignorant that they won't even notice the difference.
Microsoft got hit with an antitrust suit for using its monopoly position in one market to distort competition in another. Specifically it used its desktop monopoly to kill Netscape.
Apple doesn't have a monopoly position in the phone market. Apple's inclusion of a different mapping app isn't going to kill Google. Indeed Apple's market share in the maps market is going to remain minuscule compared to that of Google Maps.
For the record, Apple argues that the licence with Google ran out. It probably did but something tells me they didn't try very hard to negotiate an extension.
Android has had turn by turn navigation for years. It's had 3D maps for well over a year. Yet when this was announced with iOS6 the crowd of iSheep all ooohed and ahhhed like it was up there with rounded corners.
Just look again at the video - it takes brainwashing to a whole new level. Every one in the audience is for some reason pretending they are totally unaware of there being literally nothing new here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrl14SrhaUM
The problem was that Google weren't going to let Apple use their data to do turn-by-turn navigation. They were also no going to let them use vector data, cache map data etc. It was Google who forced Apple to move, and for a version 1 product they haven't done a bad job.
As for things like satellite imagery, Google Earth is still available in the App Store, you can still see that.
Public transport navigation is still somewhat lacking, but the idea that you can plug in specialised apps seems a good one.
I have no idea of the exact circumstances preventing the iOS-version of Google Maps being upgraded properly (turn-by-turn, data caching being the most useful things), but it seems clear that the primary mapping application for iOS absolutely needs these features.
Either Apple weren't willing to pay Google enough, or Google weren't willing to cede a competitive advantage that Android has over iOS, or some combination, or an argument in a toilet. Who cares? It's irrelevant, iOS needs a primary mapping app with up to date features, and so Apple had little choice once / if negotiations broke down.
I'm no apologist, but the facts are that Apple have been investing in mapping technology and companies for years now (google search will throw up many results), and as a consumer I'm happy to see competition to established players.
But it is a V1, and not a very good one - they have a huge amount of catching up to do, and given the much more closed nature (Gmaps has become so good partly as a result of independent contributors), they may find this difficult. Perhaps they should have just coughed up...
Sorry, quote some reputable sources or STFU. I've heard nothing about Google forcing Apple to stop using Google Maps and I've been following the iOS mapping story for some time. Google has poured tons of money into Maps and everything it supports - Apple can't expect to stand up even 10% of that functionality inside a year.
I can believe that Google wanted too much money for turn by turn. And I can absolutely believe that they don't want to allow caching offline - a fantastic feature in the Android app.
Apple chose to move for a variety of reasons, and iDevices are the poorer for it. This is simply fallout from The Patent Wars. Live with it or get a more advanced phone like a Galaxy S3 or Galaxy Nexus!
I don't care about turn by turn. I don't care about caching. I've got a perfectly good Garmin for that, it cost me about 90 euro and covers Western Europe offline, with TMC to boot. I'm using an iPhone and will continue to do so, but I do agree that the new Maps app is shite. The main reason : I've lost Street View... and I used that A LOT. So much that it might be a deal breaker. If Google chooses not to release a maps app for iOS I might even go to the dark side, though then I would have to deal with the crappy EAS implementation on Android (which means completely resetting your phone every couple of months).
Choices, choices...
https://developers.google.com/maps/terms
They make it impossible for Apple to use the data for turn-by-turn navigation, cache any of the data etc.
Then factor in the fact that Google have been putting the costs up significantly
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/27/google_maps_api_no_longer_free/
Google were making their turn-by-turn navigation, vectorised maps etc a USP of Android. You honestly think Apple were happy with that and couldn't be bothered to update their maps client to use the new data?
The new Maps app seems to be fairly solid, all the problems are with DATA, and the data lives in the cloud where it can be updated and fixed without users having to download or fix anything.
And one of the very first things it says in the terms and conditions link that you posted is "Unless otherwise agreed in writing with Google, the Terms will include the following:", i.e. you can't do caching etc. with the standard license. There's nothing that says you can't negotiate with Google and pay them for different terms.
So, the question once more becomes, what proof is offered that Apple tried to do so and that Google were unwilling to allow them to do so? It is certainly conceivable that Google were unwilling to co-operate or wanted to charge Apple "too much", but other explanations are equally plausible, not the least that Apple were determined to drop Google at any cost, up to and including shipping the turkey of an app that is in iOS 6.
Version 1 of Google Maps was better. Google wanted to be on the Iphone but apple kicked them off. AFAIK Google would have been happy for Iphones to have all their features but Apple wouldn't pay the license fees. Using an API for free is harder than using FRAND patents without paying.
after watching the video you linked to, I followed a related video which is called "15 funny apple ads". The video is posted on June 2007, the 3rd ad show the PC guy calling the Windows bundled application as "apps".
I don't know when the ad was made and/or aired. But will this ad affect the "App Store" trail?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCL5UgxtoLs
Maybe the audience actually were impressed. Okay, from what I've seen this is definitely not as good as Google's service and may not be for some time (another year? another two years? three?). But still, it's hugely impressive to create something like this. In amongst all the slating of Apple that is going on here, it's worth remembering how hard it is to compete with Google on their maps at all. It's good that they made this. It keeps competition in the market and being a programmer myself, I can see that this must have taken a lot of work.
I found that Ariel's website has a load of reasonably high-res photographs, although none I could see that are taken from overhead.
I've been using the betas (for development) for a few months and the map app has been utterly terrible since it was first available. I assumed it wasn't finished and would be updated properly before general release. Oh how wrong i was, it doesn't even qualify as a second rate replacement for google's map app, satellite resolution is crap everywhere around me and the locations are simply inaccurate. Its actually unbelievable that it has been deemed worthy of release. As others have said, download google earth until the problem is solved, hopefully soon.
I'm just like you - throughout the betas I assumed they hadn't switched on the UK satellite imagery to save on some licensing fees until the launch.
Interestingly, using "Find my iPhone" on iCloud.com, the satellite imagery for where I live (Brighton, UK) has the expected detail. So Apple do have access to the images, they just haven't made them available on their mobile devices.
It's the first time I'm recommending EVERYONE I KNOW to hold off on an iOS update as it's more of a downgrade where maps are concerned.
Thank the heavens I also have an Android phone (S3) - I ended up getting one to explicitly to use the Google services which I particularly like - also, any respectable geek should own at least a couple of devices from the top players.
Now, Google, where's that Google Maps iOS app already?
trying to create something that didn't already exist, then it would have been hats off to them for the effort. But they aren't. I haven't seen the new map.app yet, so I'll refrain from spouting from a bath of ignorance, but one thing I *can* complain about is that change they made way back to the ALS cache. Having only an iPod (preferring my telecomms via a regular 19-days on standby talky device), I liked the way it would remember forever what WiFi it had seen and fill in the location later when it could get online. I knew that if I'd driven or walked or train-ridden or bussed around a place, I'd be able to get a blue dot. Now, if I've spent more than 7 days not being somewhere, the cache is cleared and it becomes lost again. I fully appreciate the privacy concerns, but I'd have liked a switch in the prefs to retain the old behaviour. The problem wasn't the size of the cache, it was the lack of encryption for it. Same as I'd have liked a control to cache more map data. It was kind of handy to have all those geopoints in there for the bus tracking parts of Malcolm Barclay's excellent travel app(s).
Nowadays I barely use the map app. I used to enjoy watching the little blue dot jump around the screen.
So Apple remove a third-party app which works fine and replace it with their own version which is not fit for purpose and then everyone complains. Why are people complaining? This is not a new thing for Apple to do.
If you buy Apple, you buy into their walled garden and accept what they give you. Stop complaining and suck it up.
Apple tried to do in months what took google years and 10's if not hundreds of millions of dollars to do. to list all those street's landmarks and on most roads in town's and citys have pictures from the google car. Heck even now google is doing in inside view of places. Google has such a major lead on this would take 5+ years for apple to catch up to even come remotely close.
Because if they did, they wouldn't be sitting on as gigantic a cash pile. Corporations don't look at their money and wonder how they can use it; they look at it and wonder how they can get more. Their aim is to maximise profit, and the less money that flows out the easier this becomes.
What I'm surprised at is Apple are sitting on a gigantic cash pile, why haven't they ploughed some of that into their new mediocre maps app?
If they bothered doing that then they wouldn't be sitting on a giant mountain of cash. The reason they do is because people are willing to pay for more than what the product costs. Marketing and caché cost a lot less than year-on-year investments.
Apple knew the functionality that they were trying to duplicate. So it doesn't matter if it's a good first attempt or not. If you're going to replace anything there will be people who dislike change - any kind of change. But this is a different league: they're pissing off everyone with a product that's several generations behind. That's just stupid.
They should have stuck with Google until they had a product that was, as a minimum, comparable. Anything less is showing just how little regard they have for their customers.
Surely the maps app is pretty normal for Apple stuff though - looks great in a presentation, but when it comes to actual basic features they're more often than not very lacking.
Remember how long it took apple to "re-invent" copy and paste?!
The trouble is, like someone said above, this time apple are replacing existing functionality that their own users previously had.
When I am going abroad I plan ahead where I might need detailed directions and download the surrounding area into Google Maps cache.
It looks like Google maps already has the major roads of several countries already built-in. Thanks to that and the WiFi access where we stayed I never needed to switch on 3G roaming when we went on holiday in Italy and Greece this summer.
Out of contract HTC Desire.
Sure, it's in black and white but I find the traffic news is better.
You surely do have more mapping options. It's just the default iphone map app, that most Apple uses will use is the crap new one.
Most Apple uses have been brainwashed to accept what they are given, they wouldn't have a clue how to use a different system. "I don't want to know how it works, I don't want to mess around, my iPhone just works!" squeals the Apple user.
So thanks to this philosophy, Apple now have a userbase that is mostly incompetent and unwilling to learn anything about the devices they use. Unable to find their arses with both hands, they will wave their $600 mistake at anyone with half a brain shouting "MAPS BROKEN!"
Stop trying to spin these failures Frank, it make you look like a moron.
that the public transport is missing from iOS6 maps, as is Streetview, and taiored turn-by-turn for car, bus, bicycle, walking, also don't forget the inside mapping of airports, shopping malls etc.
However this is a fix to get full functionality back (better than before, with full Google powered turn-by-turn and vector maps, and Zagat ratings and full POI and all the above missing features).
You can get the fix here:
http://www.samsung.com/global/galaxys3/
or here:
http://www.sonymobile.com/gb/products/phones/xperia-s/
or even here:
http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/
It's that skeumorphic thing Apple are so proud of, you know calendars with spiral binding graphics at the top, Post-It(tm)-styled sticky notes etc. Same with their mapping app, although in this case it looks more like they used a Daguerrotype camera in a Montgolfier balloon rather than anything as high-tech as a Kodak.
I could live with the poor quality aerial photography, the woeful POI data (I've found businesses shown in Southampton that are actually based in Nottingham), the wacky road colouring (motorways should be blue, ffs!), the lack of motorway junction numbers, the missing features (streams, footpaths) and the lack of Street View, just about.
However, when you're selling the new Maps app on its turn-by-turn navigation, it really shouldn't be sending you the wrong way down one-way streets, or directing you to impassable junctions (it will happily tell you to turn right from York Street in Bath onto Stall Street - good luck with the bollards, the pedestrians and the oncoming cars).
They are obviously looking for places that are not "Cupertino Cool" (tm) and are therefore irrelevant. Why should an iShinester waste his or her valuable existance pandering to a load of iSheep (err.. valued clients)? I mean trying to find Sainsbury's, Archeological site etc. FFS. Bet Satrbucks and Caffe Nero outlets are accurate to the mm.
Can we have a middle finger icon as well as an up and a down thumb?
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...that the underlying map data for the new Apple Maps was supplied by Tom Tom.
Any navigation errors, or, as reported elsewhere, missing or incorrectly named towns, are therefore Tom Tom's errors, not Apple's.
This may help explain the continued reporting of drivers blindly following their sat-nav into rivers, off the edges of cliffs etc, if Tom Tom's data is so flawed.
Doesn't matter if they bought the data from Tom Tom or recycled old Luftwaffe aerial shots, they put their brand on it and now people are saying it's inferior to the competition.
Apple should never have released an app which is not up to par with the rest of the premium experience people are paying for.
Its bloody useless.
I searched for petrol station. It doesn't know of the the four I would have to pass to get the nearest one that it suggests. Which is a newsagents.
Driving directions to another petrol station pointed out I would have to park up and walk the last 70 yards.
To quote a friend of mine "I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't THAT"
It was blatantly obvious that the new Maps app was going to be worse than the old one, so I don't have an awful lot of sympathy for those who went ahead and upgraded without thinking about the consequences.
I'll stick with iOS 5 on my iPhone 4, since iOS 6 seems to make pretty much everything worse. A bit of an odd situation really. I would look into the Android option more at this point, but I have no wish to use a product which allows Google to track me even more than it already does.
"Apple isn't trying very hard to collect scarily vast amounts of data about me to use me as an advertising product. Google is"
This would be Apple who run an *advertising service* in competition with google?
What makes you think Apple will be mining any less data than google? Marketing data is extremely valuable - especially for people who buy expensive shiny devices...
Im actually flaberghasted that Apple would release this on their flagship product. A product that most people will be upgrading to, rather than coming to the brand afresh.
Everyone is going to notice the downgrade, from the what looks like ww1 era arial imagery taken from a zeppelin to the dreadful routefinding and missplaced roads and places.
The press are going to have a field day taking the piss with this, potential new customers are going to gravitate towards Android or Wp7/8 and upgraders are going to be very pissed off indeed. It doesnt matter that you can use safari to get google maps, most iphone buyers wont consider this, they will just see this awful thing with Apples name on it. This will hurt the Apple brand.
What were they thinking?
"It really is not a problem, they sold 2 million of the handsets before anyone had even seen one. What does it matter to any of those people?"
Or looking at it the other way - they sold 2m before people could see how awful some of the "upgrades" were.
Its possible that sales from this point on may be lower than before everyone realised Apple's maps app was total pants.
The IP5 will still sell in big numbers of course, but this publicity tarnishes their "it just works" image which shifts a lot of units
"Spending a fortune on your legal team and peanuts on R&D doesn't seem to be a clever business plan"
Its served Apple well to date, but yeah, you only need to look at that same old iOS UI, and the glacial pace of OSX development to see that cutting R&D is a bad idea long term for a company that prides itself on innovation...
Maps also credits the Ordnance Survey.
It's not because of Tom Tom. Or because of OS.
This is 100% an Apple fail. When you have good maps from two reputable sources, you have to *work hard* to make them useless.
It doesn't just happen. It takes skill, planning, and world class management.
Which leaves me mightily pissed off. I have a client waving a big pile of money at me to develop a Maps-based app.
What am I going to tell them now? (Except possibly 'Fine then, I'll use one of the Open databases. It'll make the app huge and take at least four times as long. But it wouldn't send the the wrong way up a one way street, or drive you off a cliff. No? Thought not. Sorry. How about we do it for Android instead?')
I don't think Apple realise the magnitude of the problem. Someone could die trying to use this for in-car navigation.
"With iOS 5, I had generally very good resolution, colour imagery of ancient sites, enough to see features not readily seen on the ground. Now the resolution is lower, so I can't zoom in to examine a feature so closely as before, and many areas are presented in black and white."
Looks like your iDevice is a useless as your peers have been telling you all along! Why are idevice owners so militant to defend what is a really mediocre device/os?
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Apple have form on this. Over a year on from the Final Cut debacle, that updated application still isn't ready for primetime and anecdotal evidence on professional editing forums indicates that Adobe are continuing to hoover up disgruntled ex-FCP editors.
Apple knew what they were doing when they released the map application. As far as they are concerned all is well because their internal corporate culture means they'll all have been back slapping one another prior to the release.
Me? I know better than to jump on any Apple OS release until the early adopters have suffered all the problems. I'll wait for the Google app.
The fail started with FCP. Then we had Lion Server. Then we had iPhoto on the iPad, which had some serious bugs in 1.0 - which were fixed - and some eccentric design decisions, which weren't.
But those are niche products with relatively small audiences.
Now we have Maps, which is so mainstream the world's major news outlets are talking about it.
It's a clear pattern of taking successful products and making them weird and broken. Either someone in upper management is attempting to kill the brand and the company, or something has gone very wrong at 1 Infinite Loop.
Anything new gets bad press. People are creatures of habit, they are worshippers of dead radicals.
And yet, when you replace anything existing, you have to provide something the old version did not have. With the new maps, the new snapshot "3D of downtown NY highrises" only does not cut it.
I live in Istanbul. You might have heard of it, it's quite a big town outside the U.S. Google Maps has very good coverage, only surpassed by Yandex (a Russian Google clone/wannabe). Bing Maps is barely adequate. Apple Maps is-quite frankly- only works (as in- does not crash, shows some streets). No decent addresses. No points of interest.
So. for iOS users over here: Finally a Turkish keyboard - hello! Only took 3 major OS revisions, meanwhile no third-party keyboards allowed, and now the new design is so bad -keys being slivers of pixels and all, too narrow to hit, no help at all.
Sorry - the embedded gps maps thing is a lot s***tier too.
Yay! March of progress! Apple knows best!
This app screws everyone who's used to the old map app. Sure extricate from Google but not before there's something decent in place. I may as well be looking at a blurred satellite map of my area with one eye shut and squinting with the other.
Very poor performance Apple and with a particularly distasteful arrogance until you had something decent to give your customers.
With over 300 million iOS devices upgradable to iOS 6 out there, this app is going to see a lot of use. Many of the inaccuracies could be addressed quite quickly if there is a SIMPLE method to report issues back to Apple (i.e. a button on the UI, not an email address) They'd need a team of people to investigate and fix them, but presumably they have that in the form of the people working at the mapping company they bought a few years back.
Google's maps didn't get to where they are without a lot of user feedback (for instance, I fixed the location of my business, as searching for the address dropped a pin in a vacant lot a couple hundred yards north of the building's actual location) Apple will need to do the same thing if they hope to catch up.
If Google pushes out the maps app for iOS fairly quickly they could make the Apple maps app suck much longer, as anyone who uses mapping a lot and doesn't need turn by turn would probably install Google's app and mostly ignore Apple's maps.
They do have a reporting button for POIs (not for errors in the actual maps themselves). It is also pants.
My local supermarket was available as a POI, and in the right place. Unfortunately it had the name truncated and was listed as a vetinary hospital. I tried to correct this, and discovered that there is no category (in either English or Japanese) for supermarket. 'Magician', yes; 'Brothel', yes; 'Supermarket', no. And no way to create new categories.
Total. Utter. Fail.
Supposedly, iMaps data was derived (in part) from OpenStreetMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org/) data. So, what is everyone's experience with the accuracy of that? I've installed it (with a Shuttle Radar Topographic map overlay) for Washington State. And it appears to be pretty accurate here.
So, is OpenStreetMap screwed up in your neighborhood? Or did Apple mess up the conversion?
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