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Apple's New Maps Aren't Actually All That Good

This article is more than 10 years old.

Over on the Apple support forums there's a certain amount of complaining going on about the quality of Apple's new Maps system, as installed with the just released iOS 6. Of course, as with absolutely anything that hundreds of thousands (millions!) of people get as something new and different from what they're used to there are always going to be complaints.

However, in certain respects it does seem that Apple's Maps aren't as good as the Google Maps they replace.

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 attractive-looking app but one that lacks many of the places of interest - local landmarks, shops and other businesses, entertainment venues, amenities and such - listed by Google.

And its satellite imagery lacks the fine resolution of almost all of Google's tech, especially when you view the terrain outside major cities.

The upshot: it's a bit rubbish, and folk who use the map regularly are getting hot under the collar.

That's one view, certainly. Another English (sorry, British, for he's Scots I think?) reviewer has done a little bit of a walk back on his original review. Gary Marshall:

We half expected an app that was just great in America and utterly useless in the UK. We were wrong.

Utterly useless is too strong, But perhaps "not quite as good as it could or should be" is better, at least in the UK:

It looks like Charles and I were lucky, because as we’re discovering today the Maps app contains lots of problems. My personal favourite is that it lists Our Price branches; for younger and/or overseas readers, Our Price was a record shop chain that closed almost a decade ago. Some towns are missing altogether; other sensible queries don’t work unless they’re phrased in a specific way (eg “Paddington” doesn’t work; “London Paddington” does); and sometimes the context awareness is broken, so a UK user searching for Christchurch near Bournemouth gets directions to New Zealand.

There's nothing wrong with Christchurch NZ, indeed part of my family emigrated there, but it's perhaps not the default you'd want for someone in the UK searching for Christchurch. As Gary points out there are two further points that can be made here. The first and most obvious is that Apple's version of Maps is a work in progress and one that we can expect to get better. Even if it might not have been a bad idea to make it better before it was released.

The other is a slightly more subtle one and applicable much more widely. Reviewers of a product cannot actually use all of it, not in the limited amount of time available before pixel time. For any of us to truly find out what something's like we need to get it out into hundreds of thousands, millions, of hands so that exploration of everything it does actually happens. If you really want to stretch it this is the argument for markets against planning. It's only when plans meet the desires of 7 billion people that we find out whether the plans are any good. For the planners themselves never have enough information about the wants and desires of that populace to decide upon what will really work.