Google reportedly distributing near-final version of standalone iOS Maps app - Page 2

I think people are complaining about ios6 maps who are 'outside US' are being rather over dramatic.

In the uk, for driving, it's night and day compared to before!
- Turn by turn availability. Finally.

- incredibly fast and lean so little data used compared to before, and a godsend browsing around areas with limited connectivity between cities towns and villages.

- 3d flyover already available in my 3year old culdesac estate. Incidently, google only recently this year added correct road and address but still old streetview of june 2008 as a construction site.

- POI from google is better and more accurate still (unsurprising). There are more and more POI being added to ios6 maps but quite a few locations need to be tweeked correctly eg restaurant on wrong street around the corner.

- transport info was another thing relatively good about old app. Still plagued by same issue of online use. Back then i still ended up using 3rd party apps - clearer and better to use and with offline mode. Now ios6 maps can link directly to 3rd party apps giving better flexibility. One slight niggle is a less intergrated feel with 3rd party GUI.

Good news. Apple Maps is absolutely worthless in Tokyo, and is the only thing keeping me from updating my iPhone.

Don't need it.  Don't want it.

I prefer Apple Maps.

 

I know right?  I get the same feeling when I watch or read anything from CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the old MSNBC,  anything Oprah related, Huffington Post, and anything related to to those idiots in Hollywood.

I completely agree - Apple Maps, often incorrect data especially outside US, no street view, no public transport, no turn by turn, no mobile offline support, closed ecosystem wall garden, no web api's

 

All maps are pretty much worthless as Japanese government restricts the export and use of its geo-information. All maps suck there except OSM maps which are created by Japanese citizens.  So, to be fair to Apple, and Google, and Nokia/Navteq, they all lack.

 

Why, do you live in Japan?  Is that why it keeps you from updating your iPhone.  If you do live in Japan, you do realize that Google Maps in Japan is also not too good either for same reason.

You have plenty of other options, including Google Maps! (Online edition) so I don't know what you are bitching about. Hopefully Apple will in fact NOT approve a standalone app. Google has been getting a free ride on the back of Apple and us users at the same time they have copied much of iOS, including underlying legacy code. Why should Apple give free ride to a company that has become a key competitor and stabbed them in the back? Apple's app will get much much better very quickly.

So, you don't think folks outside US matters, right? They are like subhumans or something. Do you think we got our iPhones for free? WE PAYED F..KING $$$$ and we had a perfectly good map until Apple decided to take it out!!!! For this, I just hope AAPL is gone crush and burn into the ground! HA!

Take up screen space with ads. Sell you down the road to it's advertisers. The only thing Google is good at.

Thank God. I used Google Maps daily, because it integrated search and public transit directions seamlessly. The current arrangement makes me search in Maps, then use a third-party app for public transit directions. It sucks. 

Very good news. Apple shouldn't have released Maps until it was ready for competing with Google Maps outside the US. Apple has made more mistakes these last months than in the whole history of the company. Said that, I wish that Apple Maps arrives to a great status, but in the mean time allow us to use Google Maps.

 

Really good news to know Google Maps is almost ready!!

Not "slimy"... If you have a choice between pushing out a product that doesn't allow you to make money, or going entirely off the radar, you do the former. As to the speed, it's been what, three months already? I'd expect the company with the best engineers in the world can do turn-by-turn-on-ios in three months...

 

Would you be willing to sacrifice regular updates on your mapping app for Street View though?

 

Because you sure as hell weren't going to get them if Google had its way.

 

Would you like instructions on how to open your browser?

A big congratulations on Nelson and DaHarder for going through every negative post about Apple maps and attempting to lend them some credibility to them by clicking on the 'Click if this is helpful' button.

 

Your example in how to build street cred. has been followed.

 

Hope you don't mind.

 

That's not a really satisfactory alternative. Otherwise, iOS wouldn't need to be an operating system, but just a browser, as all apps would run through the browser if it was as satisfactory as you seem to suggest.

 

Because iOS is nothing other than a mapping service, right?

 

I sympathise with your plight. However, your frustration is misdirected. Google bares sole responsibility for no longer having a mapping presence on iOS devices, and it occurred after considerable discussion with them which they ignored in order to one-up Apple:

 

http://allthingsd.com/20120926/apple-google-maps-talks-crashed-over-voice-guided-directions/?mod=tweet

 

 

"multiple sources familiar with Apple’s thinking say the company felt it had no choice but to replace Google Maps with its own, because of a disagreement over a key feature: Voice-guided turn-by-turn driving directions.

Spoken turn-by-turn navigation has been a free service offered through Google’s Android mobile OS for a few years now. But it was never part of the deal that brought Google’s Maps to iOS. And sources say Apple very much wanted it to be. Requiring iPhone users to look directly at handsets for directions and manually move through each step — while Android users enjoyed native voice-guided instructions — put Apple at a clear disadvantage in the mobile space. And having chosen Google as its original mapping partner, the iPhone maker was now in a position where an archrival was calling the shots on functionality important to the iOS maps feature set.

And this caused Apple — which typically enjoys very tight control over its products — no end of philosophical discomfort, sources say. Apple pushed Google hard to provide the data it needed to bring voice-guided navigation to iOS. But according to people familiar with Google’s thinking, the search giant, which had invested massive sums in creating that data and views it as a key feature of Android, wasn’t willing to simply hand it over to a competing platform."

 

Feel free to let Google know how irritated you are that they no longer felt obligated to support the devices that you purchased, and had to be replaced.

 

Now you know how the owner of a two year old Android handset feels.

 

It doesn't have ads, and it looks neat actually. I prefer its UI to Maps. It uncluttered and light.

 

Street view

 

Can you tell me what is the color of the Apple logo at the entrance of the Apple campus?

With streetview it's easy.

You forgot the next paragraph from your link:

 

And if there were terms under which it might have agreed to do so, Apple wasn’t offering them. Sources tell AllThingsD that Google, for example, wanted more say in the iOS maps feature set. It wasn’t happy simply providing back-end data. It asked for in-app branding. Apple declined. It suggested adding Google Latitude. Again, Apple declined.

 

Your link actually indicates both Apple and Google shared blame for failing to bring TBT via Google Maps to iOS users, not just Google as you'd apparently prefer to think.

Edited by Gatorguy - 11/16/12 at 5:27am

The apple map is terrible, slow and inaccurate. I never had any problems with google map, so I hope google maps come back

 

Sorry, the ability to go to Google Maps in your browser and not only see their entire mapping system but also STREET VIEW, which you couldn't before (and wouldn't be able to natively), is "not really satisfactory"? 

 

Want Tim Cook to lick your shoes clean, too? 

 

It won't be. Stop this nonsense. maps.google.com

He's gay, not a submissive masochist. Don't mix sexual preferences up please ;)

And I utterly support Apple for making that decision.

Let a company who has proven on multiple occasions that it is unable to be trusted by both business partners as well as it's own customers move beyond simply providing back-end data?

As Queen Victroria once said: "Fark that shit.".

I don't want Google on or anywhere near any of my devices, not even something as simple as in-app branding.

Thank you, Apple, for making that decision.

Thank you, Apple, for considering the customer first and;

Thank you, Apple, for your new mapping solution that, although it hasn't fallen from the heavens perfectly formed as we all know Google Maps did ;-) now gives Apple a greater degree of control over, not only the quality control of the app, but it's capabilities as well.

And if Google's not happy with that, feel free to duplicate the entire customer experience with it's own brand, instead trying to advertise itself on it's opponents systems.

Tim Cook apologized for the crap state of the mapping app..."I'm just saying"....

 

Never should have happened. But then again, Apple's all about appeasing the ludicrously infantile whining of the less than 1%… Just look at the lies in Antennagate!

Just by looking at this forum it's easy to see that it's much more than 1%.

TS, I find Cook's behavior way more mature than Steve's there.

 

Antennagate stemmed from a proven issue with (some? all?) handsets, at least up to some revision.

 I HAVE A ANTENNA_GATE_RIDDLED iPhone 4. I love it so much that I don't use the Galaxy S3 I was given by the company, but it does require a case to work properly.

 

As a CEO, you recognize there is a issue, you solve the issue in your supply chain and you communicate about it. Ideally, you offer a gift-or-retake and see who brings his system back. I wouldn't have given my iPhone back, and indeed I didn't. But I had understood you had an Androidphone, so you wouldn't know about iPhone 4, would you?

 

No, if anything your use of the forum as "proof" only proves what I've said.

…😶

As GTR notes what Google asked for to get TbT doesn't put blame on Apple, but appreciation that they didn't take the easy way out and destroy the user experience by forcing ads and more of Google's data mining onto their devices without any way for users to say no. If you don't mind about getting something for "free" but at the cost of your personal data being mined then you are welcome to use whatever service Google offers, but you have to make that choice for that service, not a choice when you buy a specific piece of HW.

By no stretch is Apple's achievement in creating their own maps a small feat. Now I've been very hard on Apple since the first beta ( and have vilified on these forums for it). My underlying issue wasn't that it wasn't as complete as Google (which it couldn't possibly be) but because they over promised and under delivered and I predicted this would become an issue because of it.

I think if they were more accurate with their achievement and informed us a little more of why they had to make the move when they did (not necessarily attacking Google) the average user would have been more understanding about the growing pains that were to be encountered. But let's remember that Apple sells hundreds of millions of iOS based devices per year so they will have a lot of data that they can use to make Apple Maps very good.

Google has the device numbers but only more recently, if you look at where Google Maps (then Google Local) was just a couple months into public release (April 2005) then Apple is kicking some serious ass. Back then MapQuest was where it was at but where is MapQuest today?

So we have a budding map system from Apple that can 1) look at the successes and failures from other mapping software going forward, 2) has more resources at their disposal tan other company in the world, 3) has a strong presence around the world (if going by iTS/App Store/iBookstore presence by country), 4) has a huge number of devices that will use their map services daily and send anonymous reports of locations that can be used to ensure that map data is most up to date in the highest priority areas.

That doesn't mean they can't do more and haven't made any missteps but they are on the road to being the best product on the market. The iOS app is already tops in my book and even on the couple occasions I was ready to blame Apple Maps the problem turned out to be something else (even I was ready to blame Apple for not finding an address simply because of the bad press).

My only big request right now is for iOS 7 to include NavTeq's version of street view (or Apple get a bunch of cars and make their own. I'd even be fine with Apple or NavTeq offered it as an in-app purchase for Apple Maps. And of course getting a web-based option for non-iOS devices. Having any links you want to send to people start as map.apple.com and then get parsed to maps.google.com just makes it seems weaker.

So you're saying with Apple Maps your travel and search data is no longer being harvested, shared with anyone outside of Apple themselves, nor used for targeted advertising?

 

How do you use Apple Maps yet opt-out of user tracking along with sharing of travel stats? Is there a way to say no unlike w/Google Maps? Not that I know of. Pretty sure they're the same in that regard. As an aside, I don't think Google Maps forces ads on users either, but could be mistaken.

Edited by Gatorguy - 11/17/12 at 8:14am

1) I wrote that Apple does collect anonymous location data. Remember LocationGate? But Apple allows you to opt-in/out and it's anonymized so it's not specific to the user but for crowd sourcing. That's very different from what Google does on every single level.

2) Yeah, they do force sponsored links.

Yelp's Apple Maps integrated results aren't sponsored? Google also claims anonymized location and search too, not personally identifiable, just like Apple.

 

BTW, that's cool they plainly mark and even change the color for sponsored results compared to standard search. Nothing sneaky there IMO. Thanks for the screen shots.

Edited by Gatorguy - 11/17/12 at 8:35am

I'm a little worried about what will happen to iOS 5 and lower when the deal runs out…

 

Of course, "we don't matter in the slightest and if we cared at all about any technology we would have went out and purchased new hardware immediately upon the release of iOS 6". 

But let's say for the sake of insanity that we do matter. Just a little. What happens when the deal runs out?

1) No, Apple has a service agreement with Yelp, TomTom and a dozen other companies for Siri and Apple Maps data. That is not a "sponsor" that is getting better placement because they paid some money for a targeted ads.

2) This is how Apple collects data on device usage to help make their device better for users. Google collects user's usage to help make more money for their customers, which are other companies...

• https://community.emc.com/people/wwn/blog/2012/09/27/apple-ios6-diagnostics-and-usage-data

3) These companies are completely different. I am Apple's customer but I'm Google's product. I wouldn't be surprised if Google refers to you and me as Eloi internally.

I'm certain the deal covers the OS for its duration provided it was released before the deal ran out.

1. You're stating as fact that when you do a search for a restaurant within the Apple Maps app that none of the integrated Yelp-delivered results are sponsored/paid for?

 

2. You're also stating as fact that Apple doesn't collect user stats nor share them with any outside parties for use in targeted advertising (just like Google). User data is only to improve their devices? Apple doesn't collect user data to make assist their own advertising customers (companies) in making more money? Seems to me only the scale is different Soli. One serves hardware with a side of data harvesting and advertising. The other serves up ads with sides of hardware. But they both harvest from their users.

 

To be totally fair Google is much more transparent about what they do, what they know, and how to control it than Apple is IMHO. That's an area Apple just isn't going to discuss. Honestly Google probably wouldn't either, or be as transparent as they are if they hadn't been forced into it. 

Edited by Gatorguy - 11/17/12 at 8:56am

1) I'm stating as a fact that when I do a search in Apple Maps I"m not getting sponsored links in a location that may or may not have anything to do with what I'm actually looking for.

2) I clearly stated and clearly showed how, when, where, what, and why Apple collects info on their devices and how the user can disable this easily. Show me all the info Google collects and we'll compare them.

3) Transparant? Really? Oh yeah, they are "open" and yet we see unbelievably high "activation" numbers for Android despite very low usage numbers for Android-based devices and I haven't seen any info where Google is disclosing their search algorithms... so much for being "open" and "transparent".