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They likely generate it the exact same way Apple and Google calculate traffic conditions - by anonymously aggregating millions of users locations. I guess you could call it tracking, but I don't consider it a privacy violation.
Well, there is an anonymous way and the evil "I want to know everything about my users" way. But do you know which way they use?
 
Well, there is an anonymous way and the evil "I want to know everything about my users" way. But do you know which way they use?
I don't since they haven't given much details. Either way, I personally don't mind sharing my anonymized location for either Google or Apple Maps if it means more useful features like traffic conditions and busyness.
 
If Google want to make their maps usable, they need them to be reasonably up to date.

Where I live, they are around 8 to 10 years behind reality. My house, and much of the road it is on, are simply gaps. I can't navigate to or from my house! Just somewhere vaguely near.

Apple are bang up to date. They even have parts of a brand new development, just a couple of hundred metres away, that has only existed for a few months.

It is not that I live in a total backwater. It is a major town in the area.

Google also fails dreadfully in not showing footways. The centre of the town has lots of narrow alleys. Google shows a footbridge over a river, but most of the footways either side are not shown. Apple is very good and shows at least most of them.

The UK might well be different to other countries. But not that many years ago, I'd find usually Google far more up to date than Apple, TomTom or most other maps. And Google's satellite imagery is far more recent, though still behind Apple.

I have found the update part on the maps hit or miss. Over all I have found for most places Google Maps tends to be more up to date than Apple’s. There are area’s I have been it is the other way around but for the most part Google wins. It is all about who they are buying the data from.
 
The thing about Google Maps that amazed me on the gen 1 iPhone was a particular use case.

Google Maps was definitely the #1 killer app on the original iPhone. It wasn’t just the full Maps experience on a pocket size device with a huge (for the time) screen. The combination of fluid multitouch UI and the built-in GPS made it better than even the desktop Google Maps of the era.

It was mind blowing and incredibly useful, and nothing else like it existed at the time. Other GPS phones (like the Nokia N95) did start to come out the same year as the iPhone, but without multitouch the user experience wasn’t even close.
 
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