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Comment by tananaev | Hacker News Reader

Probably not a popular opinion here, but I like Google Maps. Sure there's some clutter, but it's pretty good at navigation, public transit and searching for places. I don't know any better alternative.

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Compare it to the sheer readability of open street maps though, and you realise the vast white spaces next to the yellow lines are full of interesting buildings.

If anyone wants to try it, OrganicMaps on F-droid do a fantastic job delivering raster maps with navigation

Except I find OrganicMaps to have an even worse version of the problems of Google Maps for the exact reason you say it's good. I mostly don't care about all of the "interesting buildings". I care about the one interesting building that I'm trying to get to. Often, I literally cannot get it to show me the business I care about because it's the ground-floor coffee shop in a 10-story office building, and it would rather try to have 40 tiny pins for every legal firm and startup crammed onto the building than show me the ground-floor option that 95% of people would probably want.

I get it - they have no information about me. They maybe don't even have a way to understand or even guess which one I may care about, but in a city with any amount of density you need some fairly strong heuristics on what pins you're showing to filter out the valid businesses that you're unlikely to care about.

My wife and I prefer navigating with Apple maps after Google Maps stagnated for years and years. Apple's voice instructions are incomparably better.

Apple maps is the only mapping software that's taken me to the wrong place, and it's done it several times. It also tried to put me into a permanent loop once, in Branson. Luckily it was a very small loop, or I might not have noticed, being a tourist.

One time on a very long road trip across Canada, Apple Maps decided to route me two hours north of the main highway on a smaller (but paved) highway, and then across a 200km long gravel backroad, back to the main highway. I had been driving for about 10 hours at the point and didn't really notice until it told me to turn onto the gravel road. It's pretty much the only time I was afraid I'd be stranded in the middle of nowhere, since I was on about a quarter tank of gas at that point and out of cell service, so I was unsure if going back to the main highway or across the backroad would be closer to a gas station.

In the end I took the backroad and ended up just making it after driving on the "empty tank" light for about 80km (which is surprising how long it lasted!). My fault for zoning out and blindly trusting GPS!

Apple maps always load slow for me in mobile browser, I give up waiting for the map image to load every time.

I want to like Apple Maps but their reliance upon Yelp for useful information infuriates me.

That extremely depends on your location - notice there's another thread above you complaining it doesn't use Yelp anymore.

eg the US and Australia now have built-in reviews.

Reviews and user submitted content are an absolute nightmare. I can’t imagine how much of a legal headache it is for google.

Is this legal issue for Google? I think it is as many of the under maintain or moderated points of engagement just a service desert.

The 3D view is a hilariously bad anti feature imo. Like the demo screenshot showing the Golden Gate Bridge and obscuring the actual road on the map is kind of funny.

I also hate not being able to keep north fixed on the screen unless I'm in CarPlay. That just doesn't make sense.

I generally like the 3d view, but I had a hilarious experience up in Marin where I was cresting a hill and planning to take an exit, with a turn I didn't know coming right after the exit.

The entirety of the next 3 steps, precisely what I cared about the most, was totally obscured by the hill in the 3d view.

The exact same hill I was seeing out my windshield. The hill in my windshield was the reason I was glancing at my mapping app for further guidance. facepalm

Wow you get that in CarPlay? In Android Auto there is no North, I hate it.

I often find Apple Maps navigation frustrating. For instance, they don't show which platform a train is leaving from (in London). Knowing that there is a train leaving in 3 minutes somewhere on 15 platform train station isn't helpful.

what alternate reality is this? Google Maps has never stagnated ever. Tons of new features have been added every year since it was first created. Go read the maps blog posts, watch the google i/o videos, or just search for it and you'll see 10s of thousands of articles listing the new features from each year.

It's our lived reality, not the SWE-centric reality. We don't really want new features, we want the existing features to work better. The voice output on Google Maps is simply bad. It calls out turns when there are other available turns before the one you're supposed to take, and doesn't say anything to disambiguate. It draws which lane to be in for your exit but doesn't call it out. It doesn't say what you need to know for compound instructions (e.g., exit followed closely by fork). You must look at the map to be able to follow the instructions. Apple Maps does these things better and that's why we prefer to use it (with screen mirroring to the car).

And yes, we even like the 3D view. It helps provide context faster than the 2D view, even if it doesn't always render the best information. Every product has room for improvement, and Apple Maps has been improving. Google Maps isn't usefully better now than it was in 2015.

It has the most up to date business data for any map provider, and by far, their location/points of interest search is the best, also by far, they have the best satellite images available for "free" and their StreetView integrated map product is way, way ahead of the competition. Which means that, yes, GMaps is the best out there.

For those purposes yes, I can't disagree and use it myself. However often enough I actually want a map to simply orient myself or get a sense of the geography of a place, and for that purpose Google Maps is rather useless.

When you zoom out, everything is just green, no matter if it's actually a forest or not (okay, some areas with agricultural usage have been mapped, but it's far from comprehensive where I live), and when you zoom in everything is just a featureless grey-on-grey, with no way to distinguish between built-up areas and various kinds of open spaces, tree-covered or not. (Only "parks" still get shown in green – and somehow in France Google has decided to include large scale "natural parks" covering hundreds of square kilometres or more in that category, in which case once you zoom in everything in that area is shown on a green background, which is equally useless.)

The Transit app was infinitely better for public transit last time I used it. This was before the pandemic for me though.

I’ve found Citymapper to give far more realistic routes and commute times on the NYC subway.

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