Apple Maps has taken me some really strange routes (I live in a rural area) while Google consistently picks the route you'd expect.
I've been hoping for a Google alternative because their monopoly on mapping that leads to further data collection is terrifying, but I'm bearish on the idea of pure mapping data being it.
The other thing that I've been thinking about is how dangerous these directions can be in areas that get bad weather. I've had both Apple and Google try to direct me to take a very steep hill when it's icy out instead of taking the treated highway that would add five minutes to the drive. They need better understanding of road surfaces and weather.
This definitely isn't my experience. For me, Google consistently picks more dangerous routes even if they offer little to no time savings. The app consistently tries to kill me by doing things like routing me through crazy 5-way intersections when it could just as easily send me one street over for no additional time cost.
Most big cities publish data on their most dangerous intersections, so it's not like it should be an especially hard problem to fix.
1. Take the most western-route to a traffic light, make a right, and then another right into the destination.
2. Take a more slightly eastern single-lane back road that puts me right out at the destination with still an immediate right onto the main road before getting there (danger factor in the single-lane aspect)
3. Take the most eastern route, make an unprotected left turn onto the main highway (often having to use the center median lane as a buffer for space), and then make another unprotected left into the destination.
Option 1 would show the most published crash data since it's a traffic-light intersection and is most busy by default, while I'd argue that it's also still the safest.
On the flip side, Apple Maps has led me to closed roads and routes that don't actually exist, while Google Maps has never done that.
No one solution will be perfect, as they don't have exactly the same goals.
Two big factors were that Google made itself an early mover in this space, and it made the product available for free.
In the world before Google Maps, maps were frightfully expensive, or tremendously outdated.
I worked for a company that subscribed to a digital mapping service. We paid large sums of money each year for the right to use the maps. In addition to having a dedicated terminal, we even had a full-time staffer whose job was to touch up the generated maps for our purposes.
Then Google bought Keyhole, and made all of its treasures available to the public for free.
It's like someone opened a bakery and gave away bread for free until all the other bakeries went out of business. A business model that drug dealers sometimes use.
Then the remaining Google bakery decided that the way it would make money from its bread monopoly is to collect personal data on everyone who eats bread, while pretending that the bread is available at no cost.
Apple Maps may have less data and thus not always be up to date, but in the 6 months we've been using it since I got a new iPhone, it has never once steered us on a path we didn't expect. Every time we get in the car we can choose to use my phone or my wife's and we always pick mine for that reason.
Apple Maps is so much closer to feature/quality parity to Google Maps than most people realize because of the negative publicity surrounding its launch.
A whole lot of people on iPhones just don't use Apple Maps for that reason but I think it's easily the preferable choice of the two.
I think the overall design of the UI is smoother, simpler, and better. One example where Google is behind: you can't add the Transit overlay and use 3D at the same time. Google's 3D building view is cluttered and can't be seen zoomed out as much as in Apple Maps.
When you zoom and scroll around in Apple Maps, it consistently has higher framerates and less stutters than Google.
I also love the quality and performance of Look Around, despite it not being as comprehensive as Street View.
TOmTom's mentioned it a bit over the years, having something like 600 million connected devices. Every satnav, car with their maps in, reports traffic data back. Majority cars on the road use TT traffic data I think.
As for routing algos, they vary a lot and the map isnt entirely responsible for how effective they are.
There definitely needs to be an alternate to google, you're right there. Data is the start, hopefully with this news, it consolidates the competition, so its everyone vs google. not just google versus an uncoordinated mass
I don't think it's got much to do with the map data being hard to figure at as much as "carrying 100 phones set to a car trip up and down the road in a hand pulled wagon for an hour" being an irrelevant thing to worry about. 100 people aren't going to be driving on top of each other with the directions accidentally set to walk very often and outside of that kind of use case the data is going to be extraordinarily accurate.
That depends on type of data and area, in many cases OSM data is superior or as good (or as bad) as Goggle data.
For POIs and car-centric info in rich countries Google clearly dominates, for hiking and cycling data OSM is much better and so on.
If you want your business found on Google Maps, you need to provide the address, hours, etc. This is one of the first things you do when you open a business, even if you don't have a website.
Not many people bother to add the same to OpenStreetMap and that's why everyone uses Google over OSM to search for businesses.
Interested to see if OpenStreetMap could benefit from this as well.
> Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.
It sounds to me like this Foundation wants to be less of an "open Wiki" for data and more of a QA/QC "task force" for OSM data: both contributing known good data back to OSM and trying to curate the best of OSM data back out.
Also, it sounds like there's an AR/3D spatial data focus here that goes beyond what OSM currently maps.
Though everything is still vaguely worded and lacking examples, so who knows.
My best guess: control, and not having to contribute back mapping data to OSM.
Also Apple seems to be missing there.
https://www.techighness.com/post/google-maps-price-hike-its-...
What is the relationship between Overture and OpenStreetMap?
> Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.
How will Overture data be licensed?
> Data contributed to ODbL licensed datasets will be contributed under both the ODbL and CDLA permissive v2. Contributions to CDLA permissive v2 datasets will be contributed under the CDLA permissive v2.
How will Overture code be licensed?
> Overture’s open source code will be subject to the MIT license.
Fucking lame.
I worry that they will proceed to claim that it means that they do not need to actually attribute OSM. Well, Facebook for example is already violating OSM license by hiding attribution in places where normal user will never see it - even typical HN user may not click on this hidden button on FB maps.
They won't bat an eye if no profit is involved, and no guarantee to be the only one to profit.
> Moreover, with the iPhone arriving around the same time, a combination that brought maps and navigation into the pockets of millions of people globally, this had a monumental impact on incumbents such as TomTom ...
> In the intervening years, TomTom has tried to evolve, striking map and data partnerships with the likes of Uber and Microsoft ...
- - -
Super weird this article keeps carrying on about TomTom and listing half of FAANG, even mentioning impact of iPhone, yet not mentioning Apple using TomTom worldwide from 2012 till 2020.
Apple Maps was essentially pure TomTom at the start, and still relying on TomTom for USA up until 2 years ago when US went Apple native, and (as far as I know, I haven't driven outside US since pandemic) is still using TomTom internationally.
Article about dropping TomTom in domestic US in 2020:
“…less a rollout of fresh features than an important step toward the company's own mapping independence”
A 2012 discussion of TomTom the day after Maps launched:
“Does Apple Maps sound the death knell for TomTom? Probably not, although it might mean less people want to buy TomTom for iPhone. TomTom will surely have factored any negatives into the positives of its licensing agreement: this is how business works.”
https://www.pocket-lint.com/apps/news/tomtom/115879-tomtom-s...
Apple has been expanding the areas where they replace TomTom's data with their own.
Today, they are using their own data in the US, Canada, UK, New Zealand, Australia and most of the EU. Another expansion to fill out the EU coverage is in testing and expected to go live this week.
https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps-france-monaco-n...
