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Comment by jameshatheway | Hacker News Reader

I used to live in the Cayman Islands (Grand Cayman specifically), and my issue with Apple Maps is, forget about the enhanced details being mentioned in this article, the actual landmass on the map is WRONG, and I just checked - its still wrong. Roads and roundabouts and my condo, and Camana Bay (big mixed commercial living area) apparently in the ocean. Its been like this since they introduced it.

Here's a side by side of West Bay, Seven Mile Beach and Boddentown, between Apple Maps on the left and Google Maps on the right.

I understand that its not a huge market (even though there's something like 2 million+ cruise shippers stopping every year), but man... it really makes me not trust it anywhere when the map is completely wrong, geographically speaking

https://i.imgur.com/4DaiXyp.png https://i.imgur.com/f5nerNY.png

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The new maps data is covering only Southern California now and according to Apple is gonna be covering all of the mainland US in the following year. So for the rest of us in the remaining parts of the world, it will be a long time before we see any updated maps.

I wonder how this happens. If Apple has the capacity to detect grass strips between roads, how do they misplace an entire part of town (into the ocean, no less). Isn't there some sort of process in place to detect false positives?

This often happens when a map is made from data purchased from different suppliers.

Imagine you buy in the outline of landmasses from some other company. If you pay staff to 'correct' those errors, it will be mostly wasted effort, since those changes won't be sent back to the supplier and won't make it into the next version of the suppliers data.

Likewise, if you start merging your data and their data in a way which isn't 100% legally separable, you get into all kinds of trouble. Flagging up where your own street map is in conflict with the suppliers ocean map could could as 'deriving' your street map from their ocean map, meaning you no longer have all the rights to your street map.

I thought maybe who (or what, if it was automated) was tracing the map from a satellite view got confused by the mangroves in the middle of the island, since its dark color does sort of look like the nearby ocean... but it doesn't explain the ocean shapes on the west side of the island (around Seven Mile Beach and in West Bay)... and I'd have thought there'd be some double checking against traditional maps at the higher level.

What's really interesting for me is at the beginning on launch of Apple Maps, there was only the major road and the airport marked, now most of the roads are there.. overplayed on top of the body mass which is still wrong. Its almost as if , while updating their road mapping to be more accurate, they have never in the past 5 years or so updated the shape of the land masses themselves

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