Take A Closer Look At The Icon For Apple's Terrible Maps App

The app has many shortcoming sure. But criticizing an icon is getting petty. Icons are abstractions of items, not the item. So, while it could be used as representative of the problems of the map in an editorial way, it's not really a problem.

Now I see that all icons are lies!

A calculator with four buttons isn't useful.

Why is my letter flying off into the sky.

This minute hand is 20 minutes to the hour but the hour hand is clearly at 10.

Why hasn't this little green Android's arms fallen off?

Bashing Apples map app has jumped the shark.

The icon is rendered in a quarter of a square inch. Making it abstract and not directly representative is for legibility and visual reasons. Anyone navigating based off the icon for a navigation app deserves to drive into an overpass piling, because they would undoubtedly endanger others if they were on the road.

When did it become "terrible"? It has some problems that are a result of being brand new and behind Google's years of experience, but I don't think any of this warrants being "terrible."

We saw this criticism of the icon when the beta came out as a "lol, that's mildly entertaining" months ago. It's just an icon. It's not supposed to be used as literal directional advice. Do these people really expect them to put the very slight angle of the on-ramp in an icon?

This is starting to get really painfully ridiculous.

Note: the linked article was not originally written by SFGate or the San Francisco Chronicle, but rather republished from Business Insider (the small logo to indicate this seems a bit subtle to me).

I would argue that this is a worthwhile distinction, in that Business Insider is generally regarded as being closer to the inflammatory and attention-grabbing nature of a tabloid than a traditional news publication—though I recognize that they are simply one of many popular outlets using similar tactics.

This is funny, but I think that apple maps is just fine. I like the new maps app and don't understand the huge deal people are making this into.

steve jobs would have never allowed this! is this the beginning of apples demise?! etc.... a funny find though, made me chuckle!