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Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

I've been using osm more and more recently. Google just makes a bunch of frustrating decisions that really pushed me to look elsewhere. Especially in the public transport layer, but more generally in being really bad at deciding when to hide details with no way to override it and say "TELL ME THE NAME OF THIS CROSS STREET DAMNIT THATS THE ONLY REASON I KEEP ZOOMING IN HERE!!!".

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> generally in being really bad at deciding when to hide details with no way to override it and say "TELL ME THE NAME OF THIS CROSS STREET DAMNIT THATS THE ONLY REASON I KEEP ZOOMING IN HERE!!!".

Stuff like this is the main reason I end up switching to Apple Maps on the occasions that I do so. Another example is refusing to tell me the number of the upcoming exit I'm taking.

In general I would say Google Maps is still superior to Apple Maps, but between the aforementioned baffling design decisions and Google maps now including ads in destinations search results, I find myself experiencing more and more mental friction whenever I use it.

Google maps is at least getting better about screen real estate. I have an android head unit, and Maps clearly assumed you'd always be using Maps in portrait mode, because the bottom bar would clutter up the bottom of the screen with "local stuff near by you might be interested in" if you weren't actively navigating.

Eventually switched to Waze, which is now also cluttering things up with (basically) ads.

That's funny because when driving in the bay area, inability to get the -name- of the upcoming exit from google maps was driving me nuts! The exit numbers are not listed on the upcoming exit/distance signs on 280.

Both apps seem to get the names of exits consistently wrong in the Bay Area. I don’t care what a map thinks the name should be — I care what the sign says.

The inability to easily get a street name is one of my biggest pet peeves with Apple Maps, it's up there with the generally poor quality of turn-by-turn navigation (at least in the Bay Area).

There is a spot in NYC where zooming in on my iPhone in Apple Maps in satellite view causes the app to crash somewhat reliably. It has been happening for the last few months.

That section of Queens is uncomputable and even crashes human minds on occasion

One unbelievably annoying thing about seemingly every map provider is that they don’t like showing state or national boundaries.

On google maps, these national boundaries have the same line weight and a similar style to highways. It’s really annoying.

This. My car uses Google Maps for its built-in nav system, and I've spent a lot of time on road trips wondering just what state I was in. It's insane that Google hasn't added something as trivial and important as state borders.

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