IOS Maps and China

52 points by joshus 13 years ago | 36 comments

jeremymims 13 years ago |

Meanwhile, searching for a Broadway address a few blocks away from the Manhattan Apple Store in SoHo led to directions to Broadway in Brooklyn, NY.

I've used Apple products since 1993 (Centris 610) and even owned a Powerbook G3 trapped on ADB and a G4 Cube. I've put up with all sorts of weirdness from Apple over the years.

The point of technology is to help you do your job better. I saw my future of late meetings, getting lost on my way to meet clients in towns I've never seen, and missing flights during my travels.

I turned around and walked out without a new iPhone 5.

ricardobeat 13 years ago | |

A shame, that phone can run the Google Maps webapp pretty well.

I'm getting the feeling that most problems with the new Maps come from it's subpar recommendation/auto-correct engine, which (unsurprisingly) is great in Google maps. It gets thing right if you type exact, complete addresses, but can fail miserably on basic queries.

bad_user 13 years ago | | |

It's difficult to operate the Google Maps website on the small screen of a phone. On the other hand, it works well on an iPad. After I installed iOS 6, I added a shortcut to Google Maps on the desktop. Works great.

bmeckel 13 years ago | |

I've been dealing with this for months, and tried to let people know the upgrade wasn't worth it. I figured if I kept some people from it I'd have done some good. Everyone shrugged me off. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've ended up in different states and even different countries because maps search is such shit. I even held out, hoping it would get better by release, as it is their first maps product, so give them some time to work out the flaws. Not any more, I'm incredibly upset I didn't downgrade before they stopped signing 5, and am stuck with this junk for the time being. Hopefully apple pushes the google maps app through so we can forget about this ordeal.

cormullion 13 years ago | | |

> I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've ended up in [...] different countries because maps search is such shit.

Could you give us an example or two? I'm fascinated to know how such a thing would happen. Perhaps it was in Europe - the countries are terribly close together...

kalleboo 13 years ago |

If I zoom in one more step than he did on Google Maps, I see the same POIs as on his Apple map. And the copyright on maps.google.com is... "AutoNavi", the same provider he praises.

I agree that Apple have done a better presentation here by showing more data at a further zoom level. It's the exact opposite of my experience of Apple Maps here in Japan - I have to zoom in to absurd levels just to see train tracks (which should be on par with freeways IMO)

harisenbon 13 years ago | |

(Japan) My wife had updated her iPhone to iOS6 and we were using it to go to the next city over. Not only are the stations, trainlines and street names not listed unless you zoom in right on top of them, there are no traffic signals or intersection names.

The font that they chose for the area names is also incredibly wide, which works well for something like "Brooklyn" but not for a name as long as "KakamigaharaHonmachi," which is pretty standard for a Japanese town.

Everyone I've talked to in Japan who has upgraded regrets it.

snogglethorpe 13 years ago | | |

> Everyone I've talked to in Japan who has upgraded regrets it.

... and yesterday I saw a rather long prime-time Japanese TV news piece about how screwed up Apple's iOS6 maps are, where the reporter was travelling around to various places in Tokyo and showing how crazily Apple maps misrepresented them...

So the story's clearly made the jump from something techies know about to general news, just when all the resellers are trying hard to get people excited about the iphone 5...

beering 13 years ago | |

The number of people who actually know what's going on with maps nowadays is probably not much greater than the headcount of Google Maps. Meanwhile, just assume that every article and opinion piece on Apple or Google Maps is grossly misinformed.

snogglethorpe 13 years ago | |

Even Google maps in Japan way overemphasizes highways and other roads, given that they're less important than transit in places like Tokyo.

You can tone down some of road-overemphasis by selecting the transit option (路線図) in the side-menu, but this really should be turned on by default in Japan. [Using this option is also a little annoying because it highlights subway lines in rather garish colors, while (equally important) surface rail lines keep their ordinary subdued appearance.]

I dunno why they do things this way, but I suppose a lot of the tech and know-how came from the car-obsessed U.S., and probably a lot of their Japanese data comes from road-atlas companies (who have a reason to emphasize roads).

chaz 13 years ago |

I zoomed in on the area around the author's location and I'm seeing a fair amount of detail surfacing, as well as most of the same locations that are visible on the iOS 6 map. Is it possible that Apple is showing more detail farther away whereas Google requires a tighter zoom?

http://goo.gl/maps/ZQSzI

milesskorpen 13 years ago | |

... and I can't even find that area in Apple Maps. I zoom in moderately far, and the whole map seems empty.

Bud 13 years ago | |

Even if that's the only advantage Apple's maps are offering in this instance (and it does not appear to be, to me...the locations on the Apple version seem more correctly and specifically identified), that is still a real and substantive advantage, since it means that Apple is presenting the data more efficiently. It (potentially) means there is more space in their layout to show more items in a given area at a given zoom level.

dageshi 13 years ago |

Of more interest to me would be whether the apple maps are being deliberately offset like the google ones are. You can't accurately use GPS with google maps in China because the map tiles are shifted by some arbitrary amount.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/m...

You can see it very clearly if you visit the Hong Kong/Shenzhen border on google maps and toggle between map & satellite, the border is a complete mess with large parts of the Mainland side appearing on the Hong Kong side.

I've always assumed this was a deliberate thing by the Chinese government (one way or another), I wonder if apple have got away without such treatment?

olalonde 13 years ago | |

It is apparently required by the Chinese government, see comment thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4548840

beering 13 years ago |

Is it just me, or do the two examples look pretty similar? Apple Maps shows a few more businesses, but the street data look more or less equivalent.

Find me some examples where Apple Maps is complete and detailed and Google Maps has nothing.

ricardobeat 13 years ago | |

Not that exaggerated, but here you go (Porto Alegre, Brazil): http://cl.ly/image/300n11462G0U

Bonus: if you look closely at the bottom, iOS Maps shows a clear bifurcation while Google just merges it into a blob.

kulpreet 13 years ago |

I noticed this over the summer when I was in Beijing/Shanghai with the iOS 6 beta. As soon as I got on the Chinese cell network, the maps suddenly changed to the AutoNavi maps, which although they turned out to be significantly more useful, they weren't vector-based maps and you couldn't rotate them like Apple maps. I also noticed a few other things like I no longer had access maps of any other country and after comparing the maps to the Google Maps in China on my locked iOS 5 phone, the AutoNavi maps were SIGNIFICANTLY more useful (and even saved me when I was lost one time).

MetalMASK 13 years ago |

Interesting point but I'd like to see some feedback from real Chinese user(s). (although I am Chinese, I am not currently physically in China so cannot test it out).

The major difference between the two maps is that the Apple one has more POIs (and it looks even more cluttered because it contains Chinese characters). As noted by beering, the base map are essentially the same in this particular example. IOS6 maps are criticized for missing spatial features in the base map (i.e., road network, waterbodies, .etc), which largely due to the use of OSM instead of commercial database.

I am not seeing a counter example here. The comparison is even based on different map range (note the IOS6 map covers a larger region than the google map example).

What I've heard is that Google maps works really bad in some rural part of Europe, e.g., South France. Maybe look for some examples there.

fpgeek 13 years ago |

Yes, China is going to pass the US as the world's largest smartphone market. And if Apple's maps genuinely are better than Google's in China (something people are arguing about in this thread), that's to their credit.

That being said, it is important to put this in perspective. While the overall Chinese smartphone market will soon be larger than the US smartphone market, the portion currently addressable by Apple (people who will buy a smartphone that costs 450 USD and up and won't support 3G on the largest carrier) is much, much smaller. Improved maps can't be a significant part of a plan to address this because they have no impact on the bigger issues.

Show me a cheap iPhone with TD-SCDMA and I'll agree that Apple is serious about the Chinese market. Until then...

michelleclsun 13 years ago | |

I am a Hong Kong native and lived in Beijing, and traveled for work in Shenzhen and Shanghai extensively. I agree that the population that can afford an iphone in China is still a small portion. However, I believe a cheaper iPhone with TD-SCDMA may not be a viable solution for Apple to the Chinese market for two reasons.

a) The amount of craze and worship to Apple products in key cities surpasses any reasonable level. People are willing to pay, a mark up of 58% - 98% markup in the grey market in Shenzhen. In fact, there are businesses in Hong Kong that built around hiring cheap labor to line up in Apple Store and carrying the iPhones across the border for a quick turnaround of arbitraging prices. [1]

It took little more than five hours for the first Apple iPhone 5s to go on sale in China after being smuggled across the border from Hong Kong, but supplies were short and prices high.

For anyone able to secure one, the new phone cost HK$5,588 ($720), or the equivalent of around 4,545 yuan, at the Hong Kong Apple store, while they were selling for between 7,500 yuan [$1140] and 9,000 yuan [$1427] in the litter-strewn building in Shenzhen where fake and smuggled phones are often hawked. [2]

b) It is always been Apple's strategy to price high and capture a customer segment with high willingness to pay. The app store revenue has significantly higher share of revenue for fewer app downloads versus android. "..the App Store leads with a revenue share of 71% (compared to 29% for Android) even though total downloads through Google Play accounts for 35% of the total, versus 28% for iOS. * [3]

[1] http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2012/09/smuggled...

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/21/iphone-5-in-china_n...

[3] http://www.imore.com/ios-app-store-generates-double-google-p...

jeromeflipo 13 years ago |

Is there any difference between those two maps? It seems that all Apple's POIs are on Google Maps, except with bigger font and symbols. Also, the Apple Maps screenshot shows a maps that is more zoomed in.

It also looks like Apple shows the local translations of the roads and POIs names - contrary to Google Maps, but this difference could be from the language preference of the app or OS?

Seriously, who would make a judgment based on those mere screenshots?

I wish http://41latitude.com was back online. It had the best maps comparisons every published, but Justin O'Beirne closed it when he joined Apple's Maps team few years ago.

bane 13 years ago |

A little over a decade ago I was working for a company that needed map data for Beijing to produce some wall maps. We quickly found out that, at least with the dozen or so geospatial data providers we contacted at the time, the data we wanted was simply not available in the West (if it even existed at all)! The rumor in the industry was that the Chinese government didn't want accurate map data to leave the country for fear that it would be used for military planning purposes by invading powers.

All was almost a disaster until a co-worker returned from a year in Beijing and brought a small stack of locally produced paper maps of the city back with him, with careful notes where they were "not accurate". We kept 4 or 5 interns busy for a summer converting the various paper maps into digital vector data we were able to use with our GIS systems.

So the fact that less than a generation later, people are complaining that the iOS maps lack sufficient detail of the countryside or whatever is almost mindboggling to me.

On a similar note, recent travels in Seoul have also reminded me how bad our GPS systems are no matter the provider. The average GPS most people use to get around with has astonishing levels of detail[1] by anyone's standards. Would that google maps had that level of detail even in just big cities I'd be amazed.

[1] - Some sample screenshots http://www.navigadget.com/index.php/tag/inavi and yes, they do really look that good.

edit this is pretty good http://map.baidu.com/

matthewrudy 13 years ago |

For most of the prefecture level cities I've searched for I find nothing.

Kunming, Maoming, Sanya, Zhanjiang, Nanning, Nanchang, ...

It's only the big international cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Guangzou, Shenzhen, that appear.

amartya916 13 years ago | |

I think if you view that data from outside China, it's not visible. That is, the details show up only while searching from within China.

kevin_p 13 years ago | | |

And vice versa. If you're in China, you only get the most basic details for other countries - my hometown Oldham in the UK (population ~100,000) doesn't appear at all; nearby Rochdale is there but has no roads. And there are no satellite maps at all for anywhere outside China (except Taiwan and other places claimed by the PRC).

matthewrudy 13 years ago | | |

That'd be an interesting feature. Beijing, Shanghai, and such do show up from the UK. I will have to check the others when I get back to the big CN.

AllenKids 13 years ago |

I'm in China right now, and yes Google Maps is shit, at least in China. The AutoNav Maps iOS 6 utilizes is quite a bit better.

That been said, in China the one map you have to beat is Baidu, and I see Apple still have a long way to go.

glasslion 13 years ago | |

Baidu Map is not shit only if you download and store 10G+ map data on your phone

AllenKids 13 years ago | | |

The same goes for every navigation apps in China, the 3G speed and coverage is just not there yet.

skeletonjelly 13 years ago |

Sorry can you fix the title to "iOS" not "IOS" please? They paid a lot of money to Cisco, might as well distinguish and get some branding value!

pooriaazimi 13 years ago | |

He can't, because of HN's stupid auto-capitalization.

But fortunately, there's a hack: change it to " iOS ..." (an space at the beginning)

s_henry_paulson 13 years ago |

If the places shown on the map are actually in those locations, then yes, I am very impressed.

spitx 13 years ago |

>"I'm talking about those of us who live in China (you know, the place with 1.3+ billion people and the second-largest economy in the world)."

This claim is preposterous. There are 1.241 billion in India and Hindi is not even supported in the ios6.

http://i.cubeupload.com/kTSpGM.jpg

As others have pointed out, the granularity on Google Maps is not one bit poorer.

http://i.cubeupload.com/3Dj8kk.jpg

Google seems to be using AutoNavi as well, for this region.

http://i.cubeupload.com/EqvYMX.jpg

I don't know what your're talking about.

Make an effort to be elaborate.

As the late Richard Holbrooke used to say: "Know something about something. Don’t just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around."

liotier 13 years ago | |

  > There are 1.241 billion in India and
  > Hindi is not even supported in the ios6.

Only one third of the people of India speak Hindi. That's still 400 million people, but India's highly multilingual environment makes localization choices more complicated.

codeka 13 years ago | |

Google also lets you see the Chinese names (at least, in the web interface of Maps, you just uncheck "English" in the settings drop-down).