I agree. The place where Google Maps and, to a slightly lesser extent, Apple Maps fall down is in labeling roads.
I can't count the number of times I've zoomed in on a map and it shows every little sushi joint in the neighborhood, but no street names. And no amount of zooming in or out will fix it.
It's similarly frustrating when Apple and Google show a highway shield instead of a street name in an urban area. Yes, lots of streets in urban areas are also state highways. But the state highway designations only appear in real life every few miles, while the street signs I'm standing under appear on every corner.
But the greatest sin is omission. Each month I have to render about 70,000 maps from towns and cities from the Philippines to Nova Scotia. And every month I spend three days manually placing towns and businesses that exist in no online maps.
And it's not just tiny towns on far away islands. I'm talking about places in Oklahoma and Arizona and even California that either don't exist, or are stupendously wrong.
Sometimes I fantasize about having a full-time job driving around the country fixing all of Apple Maps' faults. But somehow I suspect the pay would be terrible.
I've thought about doing this too, but for hiking trails. I'm sure the pay would be abysmal, but hiking and updating online maps sounds like a blast as a job. I think it could be done fairly well with a simple GPS recorder and serialization, but the biggest challenge would be managing the partnership between the map customers like google and apple..
If anyone wants to fund this and/or has the connections to play sales/product manager, DM me.. :p
[0] https://data.fs.usda.gov/geodata/edw/datasets.php?dsetCatego...
Last year's article from the same author [1] about Goggle Maps' use of photogrammetry and other building scanning techiques was, in my opinion, one of the most interesting HN submissions ever (its comment section[2] is also worth a read).
Sadly he took them down, disappeared into the memory hole the way so many Apple employee's work has a way of doing. I'm glad he's out and writing in public again.
For some reason I thought he is some random guy just passionate about maps, I was actually looking for donate me buttons on the site because I love reading his articles whenever they are posted to HN.
Apple and Google maps are both worthless as maps without typing in an actual address and using navigation because they can't just show the main cross street names on the screen. It absolutely blows my mind that map products ship without street names clearly visible at all times.
The before/after map of downtown SF actually shows less useful data about the city. It no longer shows the names of Mission or Market streets. The fancy 3D representations of buildings don't help me negotiate on the ground.
but I agree it's infuriating. I've spoken in the past with some people who work on Maps products and have heard "people say they want it but then they really don't..." and I honestly can't imagine what UX studies are telling them that.
All the time I see a destination and I'm trying to figure out what closest cross street I should stop at and by the time I've zoomed and panned enough to find whatever random faraway place manages to have a label (feels like an unwanted game of whack-a-mole, where will the label pop up??), I can't tell if I've zoomed over to a parallel street instead.
And the solution is so simple too: whenever you zoom in enough that there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label! I mean if I zoom in so far that only the one street is visible and there's no other text on it, but Maps still leaves it blank... it just feels inexcusable.
I’m not going to go into too many specifics but for most map products I’ve worked on, the usual reason that a label doesn’t appear somewhere is because the map data provider hard-codes the potential places where a label could be displayed, and it’s not “everywhere along the road”. You might be zooming into a place where a cartographer chose not to add a label point. Good map software will try to sensibly fill in these gaps but are not perfect. Too aggressive about adding labels and you have the artists and cartographers telling you some areas on the map are too cluttered. Not aggressive enough, and some areas on the map are bare.
It’s maddening getting those bugs saying “I think there are too many labels”, backing it off, then a few days later getting the bugs, “I can’t find the street label next to my house!” Lots of simple-to-whiteboard solutions would work well for your particular neighborhood but look terrible in Manhattan or rural Idaho, not to mention Japan. It’s really not simple.
Agreed. Happens on google maps too, and that's just so irritating
Instead of zooming pinching try to click the street to drop a pin and you got the street name.
Old abstractions (maps) on newer media (phones, desktops) offer a UX that cartmakers in the past could only dream off. It is up to us to break our old habits and discover and use this new UX.
For example. When the iPhone first came people complained about the lack of copy and paste. But most of the time people don't _need_ to copy and paste text, eg they _want_ to dial the phone number they see on a webpage. Therefore they _need_ to have the phone number in their phone app. A problem which can be solved many ways (eg: recognise numbers on a page and make them clickable links directly to phone app) of which copy and paste, though the most familiar, is really one of the worst in UX.
This is the difference between what people (think they) want and what they actually need.
Back to maps. People don't want to read street names, they want the nearest address to a certain s point. Of which zooming and pinching or a cluttered screen full of text are by far the most inferior ways to use of the technology available today.
I’m not sure. It seems the maps are much less usable for visual delivery of information. I can barely see the streets because of the contrast choices, the 3D buildings obscure the streets, and the streets are always missing their names. The new Apple and Google designs push us to enter a destination where in the past all I would have needed was a quick glance.
Knowing and tracking where we are going is valuable information to the map providers; helping us get there without finding out where we want to go really isn’t.
The problem is that it is really hard to automatically determine what is the most useful thing for the user. Right now, I think the balance is a little too tilted towards not showing them.
I think that one of the evidences of this is how many extreme cases can be shown where they clearly should be shown but they are not. Its much harder to find cases where the algorithm tilts in the other direction by mistake.
They are only useful when navigating without GPS. And it's infuriating when you try to use a Google Map as a paper map: there aren't any street names on Google Map to be able to find the correct intersection to turn.
"AVs navigate themselves—so all we’ll really need to know is where we want to go. And Google, with a rapidly-growing autonomy project of its own, seems to have caught on to this.
"If you zoom out on Google Maps’s recent features, you’ll notice that they’re increasingly about figuring out “where to go?”
"And even Google’s map seems to be following this pattern. Over the last two years, Google has gradually been turning it inside out, from a road map to a place map.
"Is Google future-proofing itself against a not-too-distant world that has little need for driving directions? Whether or not that’s true, it does seem as if place information might be even more important tomorrow than it is today."
When driving in some countries in Europe a GPS will repeat that you should use <really long badly pronounced street names after an old white guy> for multiple steps when in fact the road signs don’t mention the street anywhere and just say “Center”. (Granted sometimes the GPS directions are correct and use signage info.) Or the street name may have changed 5 times, as you keep driving straight on the same road.
The problem, as with all things in maps, isn’t so clear-cut and the fixation on street names is very centric to certain countries.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
Also, Mapbox has a powerful map styling UI that lets you choose exactly what map elements to display at a given zoom level:
We can basically build or contribute to alternatives that better suit our needs.
I find it hard to believe that so much work could go into maps when actually using it doesn't seem to be the main goal. How am I going to use this greenery information?
Sometimes I just can't type name in local language correctly but I know the street name where it is and yet I can't find it by looking at the map without extreme zoom in. Searching the street name seems to give a completely random point. I end up zooming to random streets where I think mine should be over and over until I find my street - what a ridiculous process.
There's so much empty space - this obsession with form over function has to stop.
I've switched to one of openstreetmaps clients for this reason alone. They're not afraid of showing actual information.
I just don't think it's a priority anymore -- they want the map to "look pretty" and people to use turn-by-turn nav.
I agree it's a shame and extremely frustrating.
So to some extent Apple's designers and developers know the value of understand what streets are around, but that knowledge isn't evenly distributed/applied.
Hopefully they aren't using a time on screen engagement metric. That would explain why they ended up with a harder to use app. I have to look at it longer.
Either way it suggests to me Apple is solving the wrong problem in the long term.
This reminds me of all the complaints about Apple's Touch Bar, saying there aren't affordances for touch typing.
If I have to walk up 10 blocks and across 5 blocks, my route is going to depend on the traffic lights. "Directions" aren't what I want, what I want is to know where the thing is in terms of landmarks I know and can recognise, and that mostly means street names.
The first would seem valid, if Mission St is, as I gather, rather important. FWIW: after searching for Mission District, the street is now visible far more often. It's labeled even at a zoom level where the water on the east and west are comfortably within the frame.
The decision of de-emphasising street names for the benefit of landmarks/museums/event locations etc. is rather subjective: I often use Maps for purposes other than directions, such as getting a feel for an apartment's neighbourhood, finding restaurants, exploring places in the news, or that appeared in books or movies, or even just "sightseeing".
For all these purposes, the style of Google and Apple Maps is obviously far better than traditional folding maps.
You seem to do direction planning the "old-school" way of manually planning a path from A to B. But that mode has been somewhat deprecated, because typing an address and getting a specific route happens to be far better for this purpose. It's not so much decreasing skills in map reading the luddites so often bemoan: In unfamiliar locations, Google has so much more information, such as both typical and real-time traffic, specific expected times to negotiate every intersection, up-to-date road closures etc. Plus a slightly better shortest path algorithm than eyeballing it.
To get back to shrubbery: I rather shrug. Because you're right that it's less important than roads. But by its nature as just the background colour, I believe it does not actually compete with street labels, at least not in the way that other labels do.
This would seem to call for a small set of 'detail view' modes in the UI. I.e., a 'navigation' mode that priortizes street names over other details. And a 'remote sightseeing' mode that emphasies POI's over street names, etc.
Google knows they're there because they do show up in a search, but that doesn't work if you don't remember the name. I saw a restaurant while walking, went to look it up later, knew it was somewhere on a particular street, and had to resort to Street View to find it. Luckily the last Street View picture was from just after the restaurant first opened.
Presumably these businesses haven't ever paid for advertising.
Apple Maps is no better in my area. It has a few popular places and one shop that was demolished in 2002.
Really. It seems they actually put some effort into showing the names of most streets except the one you're interested in. No, really.
It's amazing how often this happens, because it's almost mind reading at this point.
What would be awesome is if the UI didn't assume I wanted to drop a pin when I'm pointing at a spot on the map - it could popup the info with an option to add a pin, or just touch away to not do that.
Thus user research probably shows that people don't want it or even complain about it.
Later versions of Google Maps didn't do this, so on some streets, you would have no idea what the street names were, and would have to zoom out or scroll out until you saw the name.
THIS is what I want fixed. I don't care about vegetation, I want to be able to see what the street names are without distracting myself on the map.
It's a disturbing trend in tech in general. Looks over function. Everything from websites to apps to actual physical products, design is more important than functionality.
The modern Google Maps does a lot of the layout and rendering on the client or on the fly, with a differing set of constraints and tradeoffs. It also has many more landmarks.
You can see this in action by going to https://mapstyle.withgoogle.com/ and playing with the "Landmarks" control.
*whole world. Apple maps users are not just in the US.
I think your concerns might be overstated though. Hopefully they've just decided to heavily focus on this area up to now to tune their algorithms etc. and will be able to roll it out much more quickly from here on out.
POIs definitely need to be much improved but there seems to be some very solid street data updates with this.
The vegetation data is literally the last thing that matters, and I can't believe Apple is this blind.
of course, simply extrapolating the current rate of progress gives a similarly dismal outlook.
Here's a side by side of West Bay, Seven Mile Beach and Boddentown, between Apple Maps on the left and Google Maps on the right.
I understand that its not a huge market (even though there's something like 2 million+ cruise shippers stopping every year), but man... it really makes me not trust it anywhere when the map is completely wrong, geographically speaking
https://i.imgur.com/4DaiXyp.png https://i.imgur.com/f5nerNY.png
Imagine you buy in the outline of landmasses from some other company. If you pay staff to 'correct' those errors, it will be mostly wasted effort, since those changes won't be sent back to the supplier and won't make it into the next version of the suppliers data.
Likewise, if you start merging your data and their data in a way which isn't 100% legally separable, you get into all kinds of trouble. Flagging up where your own street map is in conflict with the suppliers ocean map could could as 'deriving' your street map from their ocean map, meaning you no longer have all the rights to your street map.
What's really interesting for me is at the beginning on launch of Apple Maps, there was only the major road and the airport marked, now most of the roads are there.. overplayed on top of the body mass which is still wrong. Its almost as if , while updating their road mapping to be more accurate, they have never in the past 5 years or so updated the shape of the land masses themselves
The author definitely enjoys compiling these amazing essays and share this knowledge.
Thank you, Justin!
My partner briefly worked for a human-powered 3d mapping firm; they would get satellite and plane/drone photography of a large swath of land, split it up into block-sized chunks, and then each worker would take a block and use an in-house program to model the buildings at a pretty impressive level of detail. Workers got paid per-block and blocks were priced based on their complexity. They've been doing this for over 10 years by this point, so it's not an entirely unknown or uncommon thing to handle this kind of work manually.
In a world sense, the economics of making the map are very cheap.
Figuring out how many trees there are.
Do the directions work?
I'm talking postcard-perfect views around the Sydney harbor, small beaches around various bays, isolated parks near beautiful rivers and a whole lot of other places that are really beautiful and probably only known to the locals. Lots of these places were a brisk walk away from high-traffic areas too.
This is not to dismiss your question on the directions, though, which is certainly an important part of using maps on a phone.
Would you even trust an "interpreted" map with levels of green for what you're doing?
But also likely the most common one. It's not fair to lump it in with the dozens of other map use cases.
I generally use Google Earth to do this, and I'm extremely skeptical that Apple Map's foliage would work half as well.
As the linked blog post shows, they're definitely not perfect; I haven't encountered anything particularly egregious, but the fun thing about maps is that virtually everyone will run into what are ostensibly "edge cases" eventually. Apple Maps has steered me wrong before, but so has Google and Waze. (Waze has gotten much better at destinations in the last few years, after their purchase by Google, although they still have a disquieting penchant for "shortcut" directions that include "make this uncontrolled left turn across three lanes of traffic." Not only does Apple rarely do that, Google rarely does that.)
When I’m blasting down a highway, not so much.
That said, it was fine for anything that was on major highways.
It's just making the map data match the real world better, and making it useful for more than just driving.
http://gis.cambridgema.gov/dpw/trees/trees_walk.html
Or pick a tree for adoption?
https://www.cambridgema.gov/IWantTo/AdoptATree
Cambridge MA arborist has mapped all its trees.
Sadly for Apple Maps... No.
Another possible explanation is the TomTom was using these unlikely to be visited streets as trap streets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
>In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map who, if caught, would be unable to explain the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map as innocent. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.
Although I think it would actually be possible to use once-real-but-no-longer steets as trap streets, as long as your sources are improbable enough. For example, if you take a map from 1908, remove one street, then add in another single street from 1920, etc., your exact combination of streets could serve as proof of copyright infringement.
I've always found Google vs Apple maps discussions to be interesting, as I've always vastly preferred Apple Maps data for walking around places; Google Maps too often had poor building shapes that looked nothing like the real thing, or hid business names at the scale I was trying to use. Perhaps that's because I live in the Bay Area. When I'm overseas, in particular, I don't hesitate to go to Google Maps first.
I used to work in Nokia in the maps division that later became Here. I still remember when Nokia disrupted a market then dominated by the likes Tom Tom and a few others by giving away the maps for free along with every phone. Initially this was a subscription service that you had to opt into. But releasing it for free changed a lot of things.
One of those things was Google accelerating their own maps production and terminating their licensing of Nokia's Navteq maps. It took them many years after that to catch up in terms of quality after that. They had to rely on Teleatlas (now Tom Tom) for quite some time while slowly building out their maps. This is a huge investment and a lot of work. I'd say they definitely pulled ahead only a few years ago with very decent world wide coverage for most of their feature set. Here maps is still better qualitatively in some areas but their feature set is just not great at this point and they've lost most of the consumer mind share they used to have under Nokia. They are still unrivaled for offline navigation on the road and they completely own the in car navigation market at this point (around 70-80% marketshare).
Apple maps inception was around 2011ish around the time their relationship with Google soured. Actually several of my former colleagues ended up working for them after the Nokia implosion. They prematurely launched the first version and they are still heavily dependent on Tom Tom's Teleatlas (again) after last year's revision which improved things considerably. The stuff in this article is nice but world coverage like this is quite far out. Also, you can bet Google will take the hint and get their hands dirty improving their algorithms. The genius with their operation is that they are really good at collecting data, so new algorithms can be applied world wide. This is where Apple is behind: they lack the data coverage that Google has been investing in for the last decade.
Hilarious that you consider that they consider the job done. This is a random blog post.
For one "they" made no official statement about considering the job done.
Second, obviously this is just an incremental rollout.
Third, TFA mentions they already have data for (but not exposed) something like 90% of the US.
TomTom then Google Maps then literally anything else, then Apple Maps at the very end. It's hilarious how empty Apple Maps are, and considering that until very recently they were the only option for Apple CarPlay for navigation, that was extremely bad. Seriously, it was so bad that I would consider my car's built-in, shitty 5-year old sat nav system over using Apple Maps, it's that bad. Google Maps is still lacking in many many aspects(it has no idea which streets are one way, has no idea about no-left/right turn signs, it still connects roads on the map which are not connected in reality, its database of POI is lackluster at best - TomTom doesn't seem to have any of those issues), but god, Apple Maps outside of US is just bad.
Here any in-car navigation - even in my wife's 1 year old Seat Leon - is never as up-to-date as either of the major native Maps apps (Google or Apple). I exclusively use Apple Maps for navigating in the Netherlands (and elsewhere in Europe). I can count on one hand the number of times it's led us astray.
In fact, I think more like two fingers. The one time that stands out is navigating through back country in Croatia this summer. Both Apple Maps and Google Maps seemed to think a road existed that simply wasn't there, causing a massive detour to get home.
Otherwise, my experience of Apple Maps is completely the opposite to yours. Where have you been using it?
Edit: Also, OpenStreetMap is the best Maps data for anything off major roads here in Europe - it beats Apple and Google by a country mile. If you're going hiking or mountain climbing, OSM is much better.
TomTom then Google Maps then literally anything else, then Apple Maps at the very end.
Apple Maps uses TomTom data [1]. This is also our experience with driving in Germany and The Netherlands. Apple Maps is very complete and had better lane guidance than Google Maps (when we switched from Google Maps to Apple Maps when getting CarPlay). We never had problems with Apple Maps in these countries, nor Austria and Switzerland.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-tomtom/apple-rebuil...
Yelp to all intents and purposes does not exist outside of the continental Americas. London's Yelp data is essentially the work of the odd bored American tourist. As such, it's totally wrong.
I do not see how Apple improves this situation from this article. Google have an amazing advantage here.
It definitely works, at least I can confirm for bigger cities. Hopefully your (and other) areas will get updated soon with something as crucial.
If you own something you tend to use that more instead of buying something else...
It's the whole of northern California isn't it? I wouldn't refer to places like Eureka as 'the Bay Area'.
Going from there to country wide, continent wide, and ultimately global coverage is going to take a lot. Apple certainly has the financial means to do so. But it's not necessarily going to happen this decade.
> Regardless of how Apple is creating all of its buildings and other shapes, Apple is filling its map with so many of them that Google now looks empty in comparison:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54ff63f0e4b0bafce6932...
Yeah, the google view has a lot less green, but it's really a different kind of green -- it shows me where there's a public park I might visit.
Apple's green is showing vegetation, but finding that regional park gets lost in the noise.
If I wanted to find a place to visit, Google is the superior layout. If I want to get a sense of vegetation, I would just turn on satellite view!
In the apple layout, it gets lost in the noise of private-land vegetation.
Why Microsoft? They collaborated very early with a very good mapping university institute, which invented creating 3d data from stereo images, from air photos and car-level photos (for the facades), and so on, and then offered the city and regional surveyor officed cooperation contracts. they usually gave the best GIS data of all.
A few years later Google came into this business by getting the rights for US satellite data, but with satellite data you are always behind. no 3d extraction possible and always 4 years behind. local airplane stereo photos are done yearly to find illegal buildings and collect taxes for them. they are done by the state and cities.
OpenStreetMap is crowdfunded so the level of detail is unmatched of course.
I coded such 3d extraction from stereo photos in the late 80ies for our local city land surveyor office. the roof details and height was much better then than today's public data in Google or Apple' maps. feature extraction was half automatic, guided with manual help.
If you look at previous articles, he does a good job of analyzing Google’s strategy for the future of maps.
Perhaps he feels Google’s ambitions in the AV space and vast data collection capabilities in the mobile space make it a more interesting case study than Microsoft’s or OSM’s.
If I were working on maps at Google I'd be looking into ways to remove that sort of content, not emphasize it. Maybe that's Apple's thinking as well.
All in all, what I've learnt is how many petabytes must be involved in mapping the US and the world and the 3D aspects.
I have marked a lot of stars and labels for places. If these are not available on my Linux laptop or web browsers they are totally worthless.
I know Apple made MapKit for embedding and you can share links but it is miles away from enough. Apple has to fully open their map for browsers and even Android to make it actually useful but I doubt they will.
There were even demos of the reverse, where you take a street map and convert it back into a plausible photorealistic satellite image. [2]
[1] https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/ specifically https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/images/sat2map1_AtoB/late...
[2] https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/images/map2sat1_BtoA/late...
Whilst Apple and Googles map display might be leagues ahead, the voice and visual navigation in the Lexus hybrids or similar feels like it’s easily decades ahead of both Apple and Google. Both in the quality of instruction given, visual cues and even the sound of the voice.
Which really surprised me, because the last place I expected to find the best navigation system I’d ever seen was a little closed system that hasn’t received software updates since the car was built (2013).
I've been browsing this recently for Ireland http://map.geohive.ie/mapviewer.html
Really nice tool to see old maps/aerial photos overlaid with current surveys. Photos go back 25 years and maps back to the 1800s
Great use of public money by Ordnance Survey Ireland to provide public access to public data.
Also, there's https://windymaps.com/app which is the same app I think, just focused on international users.
This is both good and bad for Google Maps. Scammers have polluted Google Maps with bad locksmith entries: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/78-very-quickly-to-the...
In general the article is very critical of Apple new maps, but at one point it seems to commend them for removing roads that are no longer there:
> Notice how many of Parkfield’s roads disappear on Apple’s new map. When Apple’s vans visited, they likely saw nothing but empty fields here those roads were supposed to be (...) TomTom’s database somehow has roads from Parkfield’s boomtown days—roads that have been gone for more than 75 years. No wonder why Apple removed them.
I've never been to Parkfield but I don't think removing old roads is a good idea.
In the forests near Paris where I live, there are roads that were built 350 years ago and that ceased to be real "roads" about 150 years ago. Yet they are still passable by foot or on a mountain bike.
Some maps have them (usually, Google maps have them all) and that helps a lot when planning a bike trip for example. Some maps don't, and once you're in the middle of the forest those maps tell you there's literally no way out, which is ridiculous.
And then users will simply turn to an alternative which absolutely does not care about their privacy, undoing all of Apple's effort in protecting their users' privacy.
Apple needs to strike a balance between protecting users' privacy and performing analytics. Perhaps send the data off-shore to a location not under US jurisdiction, I don't know. But it is clear that Apple cannot keep up with its competitors with its current practices.
Google has been connecting place names by OCRing storefronts taken with their street view cars. Apple claim to be doing the same thing (but apparently doing a far worse job of it)
Here's one example article on the subject:
https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/12/06/learning-with-p...
It's incredibly detailed in pointing out the differences between old and new Apple Maps, as well as comparing map images from Apple, Google, Tom Tom, and others.
The article demonstrates through the use of animated gifs that Apple Maps has become significantly better over time and in many cases surpasses the quality of competitors.
How they don't yet have a web presence boggles my mind though. I send in small corrections to Google Maps all the time when I notice errors, Apple Maps won't let me do that.
You are telling me they have nearly 10% of workforce works on that bloody pieces of crap called Apple Map?
Has any one seen / uses Apple Map in Japan? South Korea? Taiwan? Hong Kong? ( Excludes China because all Data comes from Government ) Australia?
If anyone has been wondering how Apple got $9 billion Raw Profits from Google for being default search engine and their Margin hasn't increase a bit. Here you got the answer.
Seriously - Apple Maps after 5 years is still not good enough. And we expect Great things from Apple. Not Good or Good enough. At least the Apple when it was ran by Steve Jobs.
Apple management can not make the case spending resources on a mere bullet-point for the sale sheet of the Mac.
Oddly, I found Apple's most successful effort, greenery, to be mixed. It's really cool the data is there! But....the roads are less visible. I think they need to increase the contrast or somehow make the roads more notable amidst the green.
As for the locations, I was surprised to see the limits listed here. Apple seemed supremely confident in their Techcrunch feature. And they rarely preview stuff like this, so I had assumed they had some secret ace. But, this looks rather limited and error filled. Optimistically they only rolled it out to a small area to work out these kinks. But the errors O'bierne highlighted don't seem easily solveablr....time will tell.
It seems to me that if they were to pool their resources then not only could they save money and resources, but they could get more comprehensive imagery for less money.
Semi-related: I’ve seen instances where Google Maps in Southern California has the same street label typos as the CAMS dataset. And I don’t know why but I suspect that Google might not admit that they use such a public dataset as seed data.
I don't know a single person with a backyard tennis court, and there appear to be 6 in a small area here. Where am I looking?
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54ff63f0e4b0bafce6932...
Apple make things look amazing and work decently.
Google make things work amazingly and look decent.
It's the thought that they just got in their cars and drove up to buildings and harbours and cloverleafs and checked.
That bit just says a lot about ... accuracy.
"It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
.. proceed to explain how Apple Maps covers just 3.1% of the U.S.’s land area.
Sent from my iPhone
EDIT: check out this map of Dubai: https://2gis.ae/dubai?queryState=center%2F55.274674%2C25.197...
Also check out its search UX. Try searching for "grocery"
Most subtle changes I noticed on the examples on street names (e.g. "W 9th st" to "ninth street", sans "w") are actually a downgrade.
I still use Google for nav but I have a feeling Apple might win me over on this one.
