> "And, for popular urban locations in the United States - it's a significant improvement."
Disagreed completely. Pretty much the only people who have had a net positive from iOS6 Maps are the people who drive, and thus are able to take advantage of turn-by-turn.
Here in NYC iOS6 Maps is nearly completely useless. Searching for locations by address frequently takes you hundreds of miles away - "24 Orchard" takes you to another state, for example, even if you are standing less than half a mile from the address. Searching for places by name has a worse than 50/50 chance of finding it, and frequently completely unrelated results come up instead. Even when Apple can get the addresses of places correct, it frequently has trouble getting them in the correct locations - I've seen many instances of correct addresses dropping the pin in wrong locations - usually a block or two away.
The disaster of iOS6 Maps goes well beyond the loss of transit directions - the data and search components are atrocious.
The problem with bad mapping is that it has a thresholding effect. The utility of your mapping service does not scale linearly with the quality of your data - once your data is wrong above a certain threshold of all usage, people stop trusting your maps entirely. I do not trust iOS6 Maps because I have no way of knowing if it got anything right, and its failure rate is high enough that I have to second guess everything it tells me. Which is to say, it has become useless.
iOS6 Maps is a disaster for major urban locations in the United States. I for one am waiting for the Google Maps app to drop like a kid on Christmas eve.
That's very interesting (and useful) information. It sounds like it's not "Popular Urban Locations" but instead, a "subset of popular urban location" - Perhaps I guess I need to be very specific and say in the Bay Area (Everywhere, all the way down to Gilroy).
Your experience, though, explains why Tim Cook felt he needed to apologize.
Locally (Redwood City, Foster City, Mountain View) I prefer to use the IOS 6 Mapping application on my iPhone 5, than, rather than, side-by-side, the IOS 5 Mapping application on an iPhone 4S. Forgetting about Turn-by-Turn (which is the obvious and clear advantage of IOS 6 Mapping) - the super twitchy-fast vector Maps in IOS 6 Maps, not to mention their offline presence made all the difference. Particularly if you get into a sketchy cell area, where the old IOS 5 maps was basically "No Maps" - compared to the IOS 6 Maps which are "No Internet connection required, here are your maps."
While in Redwood City, I send all sorts of queries out to Siri like "Directions to Waterfront Pizza" (It picks the right one up in Foster City), and "Directions to 3463 Page Street" (It's intelligent enough to use the Page Street in Redwood City) - I use maps a lot, and haven't seen any regression beyond what I would see in google maps. IOS 6 maps is as close to flawless as a generic mapping application needs to be for my use in the peninsula area.
I wonder if Apple did something remarkably stupid, and only optimized the Bay Area? If so, then they deserve all the bad press they've received over their mapping application.
It might be interesting to have some third-party do a "Here are 1000 typical queries in 100 typical urban locations" and come back with a scorecard. Given that Apple is pulling a lot of data from TomTom for IOS 6 maps, I would be surprise to see their results much poorer than what TomTom would do give directly.
Google Maps are hardly perfect themselves. Not so long ago (as in September), searching for "city hall" with the Philadelphia City Hall centered on the map would transport you to a police station in Chicago. Rittenhouse Square still has a random assortment of businesses inside it. Washington Square is labeled Independence Mall State Park. There's apparently a heliport in the Constitution Center.
As long as your definition of urban locations excludes Philadelphia, Google Maps are just swell.
Comments
> "And, for popular urban locations in the United States - it's a significant improvement."
Disagreed completely. Pretty much the only people who have had a net positive from iOS6 Maps are the people who drive, and thus are able to take advantage of turn-by-turn.
Here in NYC iOS6 Maps is nearly completely useless. Searching for locations by address frequently takes you hundreds of miles away - "24 Orchard" takes you to another state, for example, even if you are standing less than half a mile from the address. Searching for places by name has a worse than 50/50 chance of finding it, and frequently completely unrelated results come up instead. Even when Apple can get the addresses of places correct, it frequently has trouble getting them in the correct locations - I've seen many instances of correct addresses dropping the pin in wrong locations - usually a block or two away.
The disaster of iOS6 Maps goes well beyond the loss of transit directions - the data and search components are atrocious.
The problem with bad mapping is that it has a thresholding effect. The utility of your mapping service does not scale linearly with the quality of your data - once your data is wrong above a certain threshold of all usage, people stop trusting your maps entirely. I do not trust iOS6 Maps because I have no way of knowing if it got anything right, and its failure rate is high enough that I have to second guess everything it tells me. Which is to say, it has become useless.
iOS6 Maps is a disaster for major urban locations in the United States. I for one am waiting for the Google Maps app to drop like a kid on Christmas eve.
That's very interesting (and useful) information. It sounds like it's not "Popular Urban Locations" but instead, a "subset of popular urban location" - Perhaps I guess I need to be very specific and say in the Bay Area (Everywhere, all the way down to Gilroy).
Your experience, though, explains why Tim Cook felt he needed to apologize.
Locally (Redwood City, Foster City, Mountain View) I prefer to use the IOS 6 Mapping application on my iPhone 5, than, rather than, side-by-side, the IOS 5 Mapping application on an iPhone 4S. Forgetting about Turn-by-Turn (which is the obvious and clear advantage of IOS 6 Mapping) - the super twitchy-fast vector Maps in IOS 6 Maps, not to mention their offline presence made all the difference. Particularly if you get into a sketchy cell area, where the old IOS 5 maps was basically "No Maps" - compared to the IOS 6 Maps which are "No Internet connection required, here are your maps."
While in Redwood City, I send all sorts of queries out to Siri like "Directions to Waterfront Pizza" (It picks the right one up in Foster City), and "Directions to 3463 Page Street" (It's intelligent enough to use the Page Street in Redwood City) - I use maps a lot, and haven't seen any regression beyond what I would see in google maps. IOS 6 maps is as close to flawless as a generic mapping application needs to be for my use in the peninsula area.
I wonder if Apple did something remarkably stupid, and only optimized the Bay Area? If so, then they deserve all the bad press they've received over their mapping application.
It might be interesting to have some third-party do a "Here are 1000 typical queries in 100 typical urban locations" and come back with a scorecard. Given that Apple is pulling a lot of data from TomTom for IOS 6 maps, I would be surprise to see their results much poorer than what TomTom would do give directly.
Google Maps are hardly perfect themselves. Not so long ago (as in September), searching for "city hall" with the Philadelphia City Hall centered on the map would transport you to a police station in Chicago. Rittenhouse Square still has a random assortment of businesses inside it. Washington Square is labeled Independence Mall State Park. There's apparently a heliport in the Constitution Center.
As long as your definition of urban locations excludes Philadelphia, Google Maps are just swell.