Hacker News Reader

Comment by Schiendelman | Hacker News Reader

There are still places in the world where Apple Maps isn't great, but for 90% of people they're now as good for navigation, if not better (since they've built a data gathering operation).

Last year I used Apple Maps for a 34,000 mile road trip. No significant issues.

View on HN

I switched to Apple Maps a couple years ago and was also pleasantly surprised how much it has improved.

In the browser, you can effectively get Apple Maps through DuckDuckGo, as their map service is built on it. There is no meaningful way to get Apple Maps navigation on Android though, and I predict it will stay that way unless Apple decides to turn it into a paid service or changes their stance on selling user data.

I've switched to Apple Maps and it's been an improvement. Much better UI on CarPlay (subjective, but I find it to be easier to quickly read/decipher while driving). Still missing the "Yelp" part of Google Maps, there's not as much of a community there.

The big pain point imo is that apple maps doesn't crawl for local business information as well as google. Many local businesses in LA do not show up on apple maps but have a presence on google maps. I wonder why apple maps engineers don't just crawl google maps and steal this data from them, I'm sure google would do the same.

Most map providers include some fake roads to fingerprint their map and Google probably does something similar for the businesses on Gmaps, so if they scraped the data it would be easy to prove they did it

I think this is mostly that businesses don’t realize there are hundreds of millions of people using Apple Maps. It’s improving; it’s a tiny amount of work for them to get more customers, and they’re learning.

I use the “report an issue” link periodically to fix things.

Woah. That’s quite the road trip! What was it?

Two trips around the US in a camper van; 41 states and about a year. It was amazing.

That's nearly 1.5 times around the globe.

For integrity, I wish Apple Maps available on web.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com