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I’ve been using Google Maps forever. When Apple Maps came out, I experimented with it a bit, even tried using it as a default, and it was terrible. Several locations it couldn’t find, or just was in the completely wrong location. Even businesses were missing.

Every now and then I try it out, and it will seem improved a bit over the previous time, but it won’t take long before I run into an address that is again missing or incorrect.

After a while, I gave up on it altogether. But sometimes on CarPlay, I will accidentally end up on Apple Maps, and will realize it after it either has me going in the wrong direction, or it can’t find the place I’m going.

Even my last trip a couple weeks ago this happened.

I’m surprised it has the usage it does, because still to this day, I — admittedly anecdotally — still have issues with the data.

I think maybe in larger cities it functions better. But outside of large cities, I think the data is still quite a bit behind Google Maps.

5 comments

Your last line is right, it's definitely a location thing. I've been using Apple Maps for years in the various big cities I've lived and I strongly prefer it over Google Maps, but whenever I'm on vacation I'll switch to Google.

I live about a dozen miles from the Googleplex in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Apple Maps has roads all around me that do not exist: at best jeep trails but mostly logging roads from 150 years ago that are nothing but forest today, barely hiking trails at this point. Apple Maps is a joke outside of major cities and has been since its debut.

There's no way to detect that via signals because if there's no cell reception, people's phones won't report back where they are/aren't driving. So you'd have to report it by hand if you care.

Anyway, if it's showing on a consumer map that probably means it was never removed from official data sources like USGS TIGER.

I switched to Apple Maps a couple of years ago. I live in Seattle and haven't had any problems with it.

Also, if you didn't know, you can delete Apple Maps entirely if you dislike it. iOS definitely tries hard to enforce those default apps.

How does it do with traffic? I was driving with a friend who was using apple maps recently, and I was able to save us from a ~20 minute traffic jam on i5 by just taking an early exit

I'm not really sure -- I don't drive during peak hours very often. Maybe you could try running both for a short while and compare the ETAs?

I opened it up and was a little surprised by what it showed in my surrounding area. It was filled with restaurants and businesses that haven't existed for years. There must be thousands or even tens of thousands of apple maps users that live in the area that see those places in the app every day. I wonder how often they try to visit one of those places. Perhaps they have a habit of searching on google (or google maps I suppose) to verify that it exists before they go to a new place? Very interesting.

I used to be extremely loyal to google maps but they simply haven't added any notable features in more than a decade. They still end the route automatically "at destination", even if you missed your turn and now are driving miles past your destination, which made me frustrated enough one day to dump it and never look back.

Apple maps does something similar but they enter "parking mode" rather than just summarily ending navigation. A little change but a huge difference in usability.

I've heard that google maps has turned into a "magic box". They'll never change the core architecture because the original developers are long gone, and any attempts to replace it are likely to result in an inferior product.