People Have Begun to Love Apple’s Most Hated Product

It’s the data, stupid.

Apple Maps works fine in places where there’s a high penetration of iPhone users. The quality falls off a cliff everywhere else:

1. Apple lacks organic data sources. Businesses everywhere care about their Google places profile. They don’t necessarily care about their Apple Maps profile if there’s not many iPhone users around. Google maps has a lot of organic reviews for businesses all over the globe, Apple is reliant on external data sources like TripAdvisor which is woefully incomplete compared to Google.

2. In places without a lot of iPhone users, Apple doesn’t care to improve Apple Maps because from their perspective it’s throwing money away.

I don’t see Apple Maps as being a competitor for Google maps. Google maps is a global mapping app, whereas Apple Maps only works properly in a few countries.

No, we just hate google maps. You can only shove people so hard before they leave.

Apple maps has more friendly driving directions.

Instead of something like "turn right in 250 feet" it says something like "go past this light, and at the next one, turn right".

That's a much better UI.

Apple directions and map is phenomenal. I google for places in google maps and then put them in Apple Maps.

Google maps has taken me through many odd routes and U-turns because it can’t disambiguate which lane I should take.

Apple Maps really made big advances there. But it can’t find businesses and ratings are pretty bad.

Also Gmaps is open across ecosystems including web, Apple Maps is iOS only and doesn’t have the same ambition of reach.

Archive link: https://archive.is/9FkNS

I don’t love Apple Maps, but I’m tired of trying to use products made by a company whose sole goal is to serve me better ads, rather than better results.

I’d rather use a slightly worse map/email app/etc than deal with Google. That said, maps has been the hardest of those tools to migrate off of.

In New Zealand, Apple Maps has been pretty horrific for some time - mainly due to incorrect or missing map data.

However, I'm now starting to use Apple Maps more (than Google Maps) - particularly for urban routes - as I find the interface much easier to read at a glance with better real-time route information.

Now we all complain about Siri instead.