Tim Cook Publishes Open Letter on Maps for iOS 6

[dgalvan123]

And when the is a system, it isn't used - ever been to Los Angeles? 9 million people and a subway and bus system THAT NO ONE USES.

L.A.'s bus and rail system has over 1.5 MILLION boardings every weekday. (that's systemwide: bus + rail)
http://www.metro.net/news/ridership-statistics/

Those 1.5 million people boarding L.A.'s buses and trains every day is more than the population of every American city except for the top 5 (New York, L.A., Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia). (Even if you assume 1.5 million boardings only corresponds to 750,000 people making roundtrips, that's still more than the population of any American city except the top 15.)

Seems like an odd definition of "no one" to me.

I live in Los Angeles. Our system is still under continuous construction/expansion, but I try to use it when it makes sense. Just depends on where you live in this great sprawling metropolis of ours. L.A. is as spread out as London, but London has continuously grown its subway system for over 100 years. L.A. pretty much re-started in 1991.

I am certainly annoyed that the maps app no longer has public transit directions in it. I used to use them quite a bit. Very convenient way to find out when the next bus/train is coming, and how much money it will cost me to get across town. I mostly used it when traveling, which makes it even worse that it's gone: Now I'll have to get the public transit app for whatever particular city I'm in, instead of just using Google's standardized interface.

 

[Oirectine]

I was a Instacast user and switch to Apple's Podcast app with no regret whatsoever. I think is weak on design level but in functionality is way superior

We have the exact opposite experiences. I can barely stand to use the Podcasts app. It's so buggy for me as to be nearly unusable. Sometimes podcasts don't download, with no error message. Sometimes they don't download with weird error messages. Sometimes a podcast will appear to be downloading but I can't start listening to it even though I can tap it and it goes into the listening view. It doesn't sync with iTunes very well. If a new podcast episode has the same title as an older podcast episode, the app will assume they are the same and pretend it has already downloaded it, and it will play the old episode when you try to listen to the new one. If you pause a podcast and the app ceases to be running in memory, when you hit "play" again from the lower music shortcut menu, it will start playing music from your library instead of the podcast you paused. All of this is extremely frustrating to me as I listen to podcasts about 30-90 minutes a day on my iPhone.

 

[chairguru22]

Ahhh...the siren song of the Apple Apologist.

Listen...nobody gives a crap what Google maps was like when it was released. Only a myopic Apple fanboy would say, "well sure, it's missing massive amounts of information, the product is useless outside the US, and you can no longer simply plan trips using public transportation, but it's better now than the product you like was 5 years ago."

so you expect a new Maps product to be comparable to a service that has had 5 years of refinement?

 

[OllyW]

so you expect a new Maps product to be comparable to a service that has had 5 years of refinement?

I don't think anyone expected it to be better than Google Maps straight out of the box but many would have preferred to keep the old iOS map app and have the option to install a beta version of the new Apple Maps if desired.

You only need to watch these forums when the iOS betas are released to see that loads of people would have installed the maps beta and Apple could have then gained another year of development with a stream of feedback from the early adopters.

Because it's been released as a supposedly finished product they are now under great pressure to fix it quickly, which could have easily been avoided if they had waited until it was really ready for release.

 

[dewthedru]

so you expect a new Maps product to be comparable to a service that has had 5 years of refinement?

yes!!!!!!! especially since apple said it was the greatest thing since sliced bread and then gave us a poop sandwich.

again, in what other instance would you be okay with a service/product provider taking an existing feature away and asking you to wait until they get their own brand of that particular feature up and running.

welcome to mcdonald's. you want the new updated cheeseburger? we no longer use heinz ketchup, which everyone was fine with. we now use our own brand because we couldn't get along with the old company so we came up with our version.

 

[Idefix]

Vive la guillotine!

Heads have rolled...

 

[I WAS the one]

All of this is extremely frustrating to me as I listen to podcasts about 30-90 minutes a day on my iPhone.

WHOA! did you try to erase it and re install it? I don't have any of those problems and I have an iPad 2!

 

[dragje]

Exactly how did Steve work the other way around? Amazing how much revisionist BS we have since Steve died.

Ever heard about dogmatic behaviour? You can ridicule every single critic towards Apple in general, but the fact remains that the new Apple direction is not about building simply fast machines but rather nice looking devices for the masses. Nothing wrong with that, but as a "pro" user I prefer horse power instead of shiny looking devices.

 

[LondonJim]

Tim Cook's PR disaster

I just read an old copy of PC PRO (their December issue) which has been on sale for at least a month. In it there is an article telling us that when you search for Basingstoke you get sent to a farm field a few miles west of where it should be. A search for Luton takes you to a village near Exeter rather than the major town a few miles away from London; even the BBC News Service (one of the slowest going) picked up this Luton gaff a few weeks ago.

To this date these errors are still not fixed. Even the recent Australian gaff took days to sort out.

The shame here is the Map is actually pretty good. Yet it's getting a savage mauling in the press and yet Tim does nothing about it.

Surely it would be an easy enough thing to have a team (individual even) dedicated to fixing publicised errors like this and those mentioned on sites like this?

Apple has a public actively flagging both shortcomings like this and POI errors and yet progress is slow.

Just how big is the Maps correction team? Pretty small it would seem.

 

[Beeplance]

I just read an old copy of PC PRO (their December issue) which has been on sale for at least a month. In it there is an article telling us that when you search for Basingstoke you get sent to a farm field a few miles west of where it should be. A search for Luton takes you to a village near Exeter rather than the major town a few miles away from London; even the BBC News Service (one of the slowest going) picked up this Luton gaff a few weeks ago.

To this date these errors are still not fixed. Even the recent Australian gaff took days to sort out.

The shame here is the Map is actually pretty good. Yet it's getting a savage mauling in the press and yet Tim does nothing about it.

Surely it would be an easy enough thing to have a team (individual even) dedicated to fixing publicised errors like this and those mentioned on sites like this?

Apple has a public actively flagging both shortcomings like this and POI errors and yet progress is slow.

Just how big is the Maps correction team? Pretty small it would seem.

I agree that the Apple Maps interface, labels, design and everything has a very nice feel to it, very sleek. However, the mapping data is really lackluster, at least in my country.

Corrections is also taking a long time, even though Tim has claimed several times that "they're working round the clock to fix the errors". Will take some time before the data even attains any fundamental standard. I'll be using Google Maps till then, it works great here.

I've always wondered how big the Maps team is too.

 

[OllyW]

To this date these errors are still not fixed

The Black Country town of Dudley is positioned miles away from it's true location and the error was reported by at least one MR member during the beta testing stage. It was one of the errors highlighted on the BBC News article the day after iOS 6 was released and I've personally sent in at least 5 reports telling them it's 7 miles away from where it should be. It's even made the Huffington Post list of 10 Funniest Fails in Apple Maps.

3 months later and it is still unfixed. It's not very reassuring when something that is that well publicised and has been reported on numerous ocasions has been ignored up to now.

 

[Squilly]

Lets be real. Maps is "ok" now, but give it about 6 months and its going to be all you use. I personally use it a lot and have never had an issue with it.

Just to point it out there.... it's 6 months in. I'm still not using Maps.

 

[iBreatheApple]

Lets be real. Maps is "ok" now, but give it about 6 months and its going to be all you use.

A year later and I wouldn't consider Apple Maps better than Google in any aspect for a second. And that comes from a major fanboy.

 

[msandersen]

A year later and I wouldn't consider Apple Maps better than Google in any aspect for a second. And that comes from a major fanboy.

True, Google's maps are more detailed, and nobody beats them on Search. I use Apple's maps almost exclusively here in Sydney, many of my major gripes about the local maps have gradually been fixed, though by no means all, in particular they seem to have joined two datasets showing train stations, and they don't match up exactly (where along a station to you put the icon), and as a result most stations show up twice next to each other. Nonetheless it is more convenient for me to use the builtin maps, and they are quite accurate for my area. They just don't show building boundaries like Google's maps do, something they built up to over years, and generally not important to me. Apple's maps have started to show plan outlines of buildings when zoomed in close, but they are obviously drawn roughly from the satellite image, which is taken at an angle, so the ground outline is not accurate, often overlapping the road the same as the satellite image.
The only time I use Google Maps is when I need to search for a place, not a street, since Apple's search is literal and won't find misspelled places or streets, and it's listings of businesses etc is very limited.
It is easy to forget Google had similar issues when starting out and relying on other people's data, but back then before the iPhone there weren't any consumer smartphones where a lot these issues mattered or the number of users expecting perfect maps and infallible routing capabilities.
Apple Maps are great for my purposes, none of it's publicised shortcomings has affected me greatly. The main issue for me is search. If the 3D buildings data was more extensive, I would use it more. In Hybrid view, it is great for researching an area, much better than just a limited-resolution satellite image taken st some odd angle. This is one of its main differentiators and advantages over Google's maps. But in Sydney the only area covered is the CBD, which I rarely need.