Regardless of how it stands compared to standalone GPS units and Android it's a big improvement over the previous maps app.
I suspect that puts you in a tiny minority...
Streetview is a huge deal.
The lack of transit integration also pretty much makes Apple's maps a non-starter for me.
I'm curious to see what they do in places like Tokyo, where public transit is used for a huge majority of trips, and the transit system is complicated enough that a good routing app is very useful. The iphone is very popular in Japan, so I'd think Apple would be somewhat reluctant to just give its customers the finger like that...
This is a potential goldmine for Android OEMs. The Japanese frequently buy new phones (more so than any other country, I believe), and if word gets out that the iPhone doesn't have public transit directions, they could easily make a lot of sales.
I've even heard that there are some ones already for say the Tokyo subway.
My suspicion is that the Japanese resellers (au, SoftBank) will preinstall something better than Apple's map (maybe Google's rumored new mapping app). I've no idea how much freedom they have to do this under their contracts with Apple, though, or whether they could integrate such an app more deeply (e.g. cause it to be used as the system default mapping app).
And transit integration is important ONLY for those in the US but poorly implemented/not existent in the rest of the world. Most public transport providers I've seen have had their own dedicated apps for transit for years now.
You are wrong. Hint: I don't live in the U.S.
> Most public transport providers I've seen have had their own dedicated apps for transit for years now.
... and most suck. Even those that don't suck explicitly, suck simply by requiring the user to switch apps for something that is very naturally integrated with mapping.
And of course in the case of cities like Tokyo, where there are dozens of different rail operators, and a single trip often involves more than one, provider-specific apps are a decidedly poor solution.
This is absolutely not true.
Or rather, it wasn't true until about a week or two ago, when something suddenly seemed to go dreadfully wrong. My presumption is that this was a bug in a new release; we'll see.