Technology

Betteridge's law (of headlines) is an adage that states "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

I'm in the middle of a fairly populated US suburb, and Apple maps still sends anyone trying to find my house 3 blocks away, so I'm going to say that it's not "finally good."

As soon as I get those people to use Google Maps, they're on their way without issues. I can see why Apple Maps might make the mistake that they do, but the fact is that Google Maps doesn't and hasn't ever in the last 15 years. I recently had a bunch of contractors around for quotes on some renovations and the iOS users ended up lost every time while the Android users never had a problem.

Appple maps sucks outside of the US. I can’t even get cycling directions anywhere in canada. It barely provides even the most basic driving directions. Probably the most useless app on my phone. I don’t even know why they include it outside of the US.

is Apple Maps finally good?

No. Definitely not “good.” It used to be terrible and maybe isn’t so bad anymore, though.

For instance, around here there are a lot of private driveways; farming roads, dirt paths on private property, things like that. Apple would route me through those, I would mark them as not a road, they would be reviewed, and a month later they would reappear on the map. Why would I trust a map that jeeps trying to route me down a private washed out dirt path?

I was going to a meeting and typed in the address they provided. Apple popped up a location, but it was about an hour away in the wrong direction. It turns out that Apple didn’t know the correct address, so they helpfully corrected it to a different number, street, and city.

I needed to get to sports practice at a community center, so I put in the address. Apple took me to a literal empty field ten minutes away from the actual location.

If that’s the best they can do, why would I ever trust them? Maybe it’s better, but it was so bad for so long that I don’t even want to try it again.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

But with one earbud in and Siri activated, you can have a friendly voice guide you through a foreign city, drifting you towards cycle lanes and safer routes and navigating often complex one-way systems.

In my hometown of London, where a lot of cycling routes are pathways in woods or through reservoirs, it has a habit of sending you down these dark and sometimes dangerous paths at night when the streets are much quicker and mostly empty.

In the post-apocalyptic, post-internet world in HBO’s The Last Of Us, there’s a scene in which the main character Joel, having spent weeks traversing an icy wasteland, happens upon a small cottage inhabited by an old couple.

As Cue himself recognises, “there are really only two mapmakers left in the world, in ourselves and Google” – and that monopoly of information, says Clancy Wilmott, a professor specialising in digital cartographies at Berkley, has consequences.

For their part, the Apple Maps engineers I spoke with acknowledged that they were more reliant on AI, aerial photography and existing data in rural settings and were focusing on expanding to more cities.

I’d say: ‘Once you’re on Ascension and you see the brick column, that driveway right after is mine.’ We’ve been working hard on that as well,” Cue says, adding that the future might be Siri telling you to “make a left at the yellow house”.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

In the Netherlands, I want to say that Apple Maps is actually better than Google… but only if you’re driving.

For some insane reason they don’t have biking maps here (or at least in all the places I’ve tried) which is such an enormous blunder.

Wellll, considering I've recently needed to use Lyft and uber a good bit, and the drivers were mostly using apple stuff, and I had to open up my android device to use Waze so they could get guided for half the damn trip while apple's maps just sat there spinning, I'm not very impressed.

My wife prefers iOS, so we've tried using it a handful of times when my device had other issues (broken screen, etc) and the damn thing got us lost three of those times. It did eventually get us back into areas I knew well enough to just get places myself, but it was a laggy, shitty experience.

I fucking hate Google for so many reasons, but their maps work. Waze works fine as well (though who knows for how long lol). Osmand is okay, but isn't as reliable. Nothing else on android is any better than osmand, just different.

Apple maps just isn't on par with any of those three yet. Maybe it will be eventually though!

It’s so much better than before, but mainly if you’re in the US.

It’s my preferred map for driving; it looks nicer, the voice navigation sounds better and it suits what I need.

Google maps works better overseas but they also crowdsource their maps.

The only way Apple Maps is good is if you put in a million requests to fix all of the issues with mislabeled business, incorrect routing, nonexistent places, etc. Only then would I consider Apple Maps to be on par with Google Maps. Since I have an iPhone and like the interface I tend to use Apple Maps more often, but the terrible search (which routinely doesn’t list easy to find locations), awful routing (it loves to take the express lane which has different exits without providing a toggle not to use these lanes), and out of date mapping data (I’ve gone to multiple nonexistent locations) makes me go back to Google Maps every time. I will admit I do love their 3D maps and street view which I find to be higher quality than Google Maps. Besides this and the interface, Apple Maps is inferior to Google Maps.

I use Apple Maps for directions and Google maps when I want to “explore” or look for restaurants. Discovery on Apple Maps is still awful and requires you to have Yelp installed. On the flipside though they beat Google to having intersection lights and stop signs on the map while driving. The overall experience and animations are also far smoother on Apple Maps which is what makes me use it for driving. Google maps, like many Google products has a low framerate for its animations.