PLEASE combine the awesome, fast 3D of Flyover with the street-level vantage point of Street View! That sounds like what this is.
Street View is SOOOO SLOOOOOOOOW and awkward to get around (and so blurry and glitchy). Flyover works so much better, I now use it when I used to use Street View. Being up in the air actually doesn't stop me from recognizing driveways and buildings just fine; but bringing it down to ground level would be the best of both worlds.
And keep expanding the coverage. Street View is the only game in town, most places. I'm lucky that I have Flyover in my city.
This is one of the most blatant wastes of money by a company just because they have some old hate-on grudge against Google.
That's not what happened. This has been documented.
BOTH companies couldn't come to an agreement. And rightly so: BOTH had legitimate different business needs.
Google demanded the personal data and locations of Apple users, and Apple is not in the business of selling that info. It would be a big mistake if Apple caved in on that point. Yet Google's not wrong to ask for that data--selling anonymized data to advertisers it's what they're all about.
If Apple would not give Google that data, then Google would not give Apple updated maps (vector tiles etc.).
So Apple had no choice but to part ways. Blame both companies or blame neither, but don't blame Apple.
And if it was just a "grudge" Apple could have hurt Google far worse: simply offering an alternarive search engine as the default. But Apple and Google actually still work together where it makes sense.
EXAMPLE:
Apple Maps has a button that will send you to Google Maps, or any other maps app! (A stopgap solution for transit, for instance.) I rarely use Google Maps, and only for transit--because Apple Maps is superior where I live--but when I do use it, I do my search in Apple Maps, and then let it transfer me to Google Maps to see the transit times. That's not how a "grudge" works; that's how a practical technology decision works.
P.S. I agree that Apple should let you set a different default for web, email, and maps. Maybe it will happen. However... think it through and it's not so simple: every app would clamor to be made the default, tricking a lot of people into having a FAR worse iOS experience a huge amount of the time. (Apple takes the blame, and users suffer.) A curated list of "allowed" map services could help this (much like the curated list of search providers). But what about security and privacy, when third-party apps send you to a different map or browser service? iOS has far better security and privacy design than Android, and controlling what happens when you exit an app makes that possible. And what about system integration? The mapping service isn't a standalone app--it's integrated with everything from Messages to Photos to Find My Friends to a zillion third-party apps. Can you make that integration work the same with ANY map service, when different services have different features? How much time should Apple spend debugging all those eventualities? Maybe money can be thrown at all these problems at make them go away. But it's a complex thing people are asking for, not just "let me set the default."
