Fans rap Apple's 'crap' Map app Apple today faced the ire of thousands of irritated iOS 6 users who upgraded to the new version of the iDevice operating system only to discover the Cupertino's new Maps app is, well, pants. As we noted in our review of iOS 6 yesterday, Apple dropped Google's mapping system in favour of one of its own. The result is an …
"With iOS 5, I had generally very good resolution, colour imagery of ancient sites, enough to see features not readily seen on the ground. Now the resolution is lower, so I can't zoom in to examine a feature so closely as before, and many areas are presented in black and white."
Looks like your iDevice is a useless as your peers have been telling you all along! Why are idevice owners so militant to defend what is a really mediocre device/os?
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Apple have form on this. Over a year on from the Final Cut debacle, that updated application still isn't ready for primetime and anecdotal evidence on professional editing forums indicates that Adobe are continuing to hoover up disgruntled ex-FCP editors.
Apple knew what they were doing when they released the map application. As far as they are concerned all is well because their internal corporate culture means they'll all have been back slapping one another prior to the release.
Me? I know better than to jump on any Apple OS release until the early adopters have suffered all the problems. I'll wait for the Google app.
The fail started with FCP. Then we had Lion Server. Then we had iPhoto on the iPad, which had some serious bugs in 1.0 - which were fixed - and some eccentric design decisions, which weren't.
But those are niche products with relatively small audiences.
Now we have Maps, which is so mainstream the world's major news outlets are talking about it.
It's a clear pattern of taking successful products and making them weird and broken. Either someone in upper management is attempting to kill the brand and the company, or something has gone very wrong at 1 Infinite Loop.
Anything new gets bad press. People are creatures of habit, they are worshippers of dead radicals.
And yet, when you replace anything existing, you have to provide something the old version did not have. With the new maps, the new snapshot "3D of downtown NY highrises" only does not cut it.
I live in Istanbul. You might have heard of it, it's quite a big town outside the U.S. Google Maps has very good coverage, only surpassed by Yandex (a Russian Google clone/wannabe). Bing Maps is barely adequate. Apple Maps is-quite frankly- only works (as in- does not crash, shows some streets). No decent addresses. No points of interest.
So. for iOS users over here: Finally a Turkish keyboard - hello! Only took 3 major OS revisions, meanwhile no third-party keyboards allowed, and now the new design is so bad -keys being slivers of pixels and all, too narrow to hit, no help at all.
Sorry - the embedded gps maps thing is a lot s***tier too.
Yay! March of progress! Apple knows best!
This app screws everyone who's used to the old map app. Sure extricate from Google but not before there's something decent in place. I may as well be looking at a blurred satellite map of my area with one eye shut and squinting with the other.
Very poor performance Apple and with a particularly distasteful arrogance until you had something decent to give your customers.
With over 300 million iOS devices upgradable to iOS 6 out there, this app is going to see a lot of use. Many of the inaccuracies could be addressed quite quickly if there is a SIMPLE method to report issues back to Apple (i.e. a button on the UI, not an email address) They'd need a team of people to investigate and fix them, but presumably they have that in the form of the people working at the mapping company they bought a few years back.
Google's maps didn't get to where they are without a lot of user feedback (for instance, I fixed the location of my business, as searching for the address dropped a pin in a vacant lot a couple hundred yards north of the building's actual location) Apple will need to do the same thing if they hope to catch up.
If Google pushes out the maps app for iOS fairly quickly they could make the Apple maps app suck much longer, as anyone who uses mapping a lot and doesn't need turn by turn would probably install Google's app and mostly ignore Apple's maps.
They do have a reporting button for POIs (not for errors in the actual maps themselves). It is also pants.
My local supermarket was available as a POI, and in the right place. Unfortunately it had the name truncated and was listed as a vetinary hospital. I tried to correct this, and discovered that there is no category (in either English or Japanese) for supermarket. 'Magician', yes; 'Brothel', yes; 'Supermarket', no. And no way to create new categories.
Total. Utter. Fail.
Supposedly, iMaps data was derived (in part) from OpenStreetMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org/) data. So, what is everyone's experience with the accuracy of that? I've installed it (with a Shuttle Radar Topographic map overlay) for Washington State. And it appears to be pretty accurate here.
So, is OpenStreetMap screwed up in your neighborhood? Or did Apple mess up the conversion?
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