Apple’s iOS 6 update is almost a day old, and for iPhone and iPad users, there’s much to love about this newborn. Despite a few odd glitches, it’s a solid update. Everything seems to run faster, use less battery life, and there are all sorts of easter eggs (such as the delightful Panorama feature) waiting to be uncovered.
But if you’re still waiting to upgrade, chances are it’s for the one reason I heard over and over from iOS users Wednesday: you’re reluctant to let go of the Google Maps app.
Google Maps is replaced as the default in iOS 6 by Apple’s own Maps. (Google has indicated it will bring out its own iOS app, though it doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to release it.)
Condemnation of Maps was swift and fierce. The lack of transit directions irked many. Entrepreneur Anil Dash unleashed a blistering attack on his blog, pointing out how many addresses in New York the app either got wrong or couldn’t find (such as Bloomberg HQ).
A parody Twitter account, @iOS6Maps, was created, and just as swiftly removed by Twitter. Though screenshots remain:
I really hoped I could say this criticism was unwarranted. Maps is a beautiful-looking app, with 3-D buildings and satellite imagery to rival anything in Google Earth. Turn-by-turn directions are provided by GPS industry leader TomTom.
Apple bought three mapping companies to make this happen, and has had years to refine it. How bad could it be?
The answer, I’m sad to say as an Apple fan, is very bad indeed. Almost unusably bad. Maps takes all the trust Apple has built up among its users over the years â€" trust that its products just work â€" and squanders nearly all of it in one go.
Case in point: the screenshot at the top of this story. The first time I saw this, I thought it must be New Orleans, not downtown San Francisco.
Did you know San Fran had a French Quarter? It doesn’t; it’s an overambitious nickname for one alley with a bunch of French restaurants in it. Yet when you zoom out, the more important surrounding names, Union Square and the Financial District, vanish.
The French Quarter remains, writ large â€" along with other neighborhood names that are rarely used, such as “Intermission†and Showplace Square. Was Apple this desperate to be different?
And that’s the least of the problems on this particular map. Check out the traffic. Google gives you four levels of it on every street: red, yellow, green for clear, blank for no information. Apple gives you a scant few red dotted lines.
Maps does a great job of alerting you to traffic accidents and roadwork, to be sure. Google doesn’t do that. Score one for Apple. But that information is useless without a more granular display of what these events are doing to traffic.
We look to real-time traffic to give us the full picture of our options when plotting a route. By omitting the orange traffic (which, for all we know, could be clogging every other road downtown), Maps takes essential information out of the driver’s hands.
This is one area where the Apple design aesthetic â€" remove as much as you can â€" does more harm than good.
The integration of Yelp reviews is a nice touch, though a little useless without the search functions of the actual Yelp app. It’s nice to know there’s a cheap 3.5 star Thai restaurant on the corner, say, but wouldn’t you prefer to know that there’s a cheap five-star Thai place two blocks away?
It’s also odd to see which Yelp reviews are visible when zoomed out. Potrero Hill, for example, is a neighborhood dotted with fantastic restaurants and stores. What’s the first thing Maps wants to show you? A local GP called the House Doctor.
Getting Lost
The more I look at the map, the more errors and odd choices I see. Here’s a biggie: the Walt Disney Family Museum, a hit with tourists, is shown downtown â€" instead of where it really is, seven miles away in the Presidio. Whoops!
Something else that’s a hit with tourists: proper orientation. When I pointed my phone at the Ferry Building and double-tapped the locator icon, the map swung around as if I were pointing away from the Ferry Building.
You’d laugh, but for all the iPhone-toting tourists who are likely to get lost this way it’s no laughing matter.
Turn, Turn, Turn
Then there’s the turn by turn directions â€" which are going to be very useful, for a certain kind of driver. One who likes to be constricted and instructed, one step at a time.
Personally, I’d gotten used to skipping one or more directions ahead in Google Maps, especially for those tricky freeway exits. With directions and pictures together, I stood a good chance of memorizing the route and being able to put the phone away altogether.
Maps, bizarrely enough, has divorced the directions from the pictures. You can either get a list of the turns, or see the whole map without turn descriptions, but never the twain shall meet.
When Siri reads you directions on the phone, you can’t skip forward until you’ve physically reached the next location. (You do get the option to skip ahead on the iPad version of Maps â€" but not on the phone.)
This is Apple, of course, a company that likes to iterate until it gets a product right. So I have absolutely no doubt that Maps is going to get better. I can’t wait to see how it looks in a few updates’ time.
It’s just that the problems are so numerous, Maps may never have a chance to prove itself before Google comes back strong. The search giant will soon release its iOS version, probably after just enough time has passed for us all to try Apple’s Maps and pronounce it DOA.
When it comes down to it, this was an odd area for Apple to try to compete in. Google has a head start of about a decade when it comes to mapping technology, not to mention Street View (which is nowhere in Maps).
And if you doubt how obsessively the search giant tweaks its own maps, probably more than any other Google product, read this story. Neither company is sitting on its laurels here.
What do you make of Apple’s Maps versus Google Maps? Let us know in the comments.
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