On the Timing of Apple’s Map Switch(daringfireball.net) |
On the Timing of Apple’s Map Switch(daringfireball.net) |
The alternative being to release a terrible version that tarnishes their brand, that is way better alternative
This smells of revisionism.
I'm sure there'd be thousands of people willing to give it a go, and people would be much more forgiving of errors if it wasn't the only option.
I guess if you're crowdsourcing map data the only way to start improving it is to get it out there. But don't act like it's all mind games and strategery and say that Google knew that Apple knew that Google knew that Apple was going to drop Google for maps. Reading the past couple of posts was exhausting and doesn't comfort me at all when my phone tells me to drive into a lake.
Apple would have to acquiesce to Google on a lot of fronts to get better maps features (that are a major improvement in many places), and get stuck working on something that could never compare in perpetuity. Launch or die, right?
Well, I personally can't wait for OS XI, since by that criteria, Apple apparently hasn't released a major OS update since OS X yet.
Version numbers schmersion numbers. Ship it when it's ready.
The original Google Maps was pretty bad. Mapquest beat it much of the time. There was one road in my hometown, and none in many countries.
Google devoted enormous resources to acquiring data (petabytes worth), processing it, correcting it, to give us the product we have today.
Even though Apple acquired some neat companies that made data look good, they obviously underestimated how much data was required to make it useful. No amount of QC could have prepared them, frankly.
The upside is that Google has been fairly closed with their map products. They're miles ahead of Apple, who will need every partner they can find to close the gap. Hopefully it will give the data providers a bit of leverage to get refinements back out so it can be used in endeavours other than showing where the nearest pizza joint is.
But are they really unusable? From my perspective it seems as though Apple’s maps are merely inferior, not unusable. Some aspects are even better than they were before (on iOS), some (very few) are better than Google Maps (traffic info in Germany is quite impressive).
Everyone here seems to take it as self-evident that the maps are unusable. I don’t get that. To me it looks like a slight (again, depending on use case) regression in the short term.
I also don’t get the deification of Google Maps. I remember they weren’t that great in Germany only two or so years ago. I still encounter mistakes regularly. Google Maps are awesome despite those flaws.
There are places where Apple has an advantage over Google, but Google has been pouring resources into Maps for a long time.
Garmin, TomTom, Navteq, etc. won't be nearly as good as Apple or Google because they aggregate sources.
They aren't unusable, and are better than if you rely on a dedicated GPS. But they can still be improved. Apple doesn't seem to be weighting proximity for search as effectively as Google (unsurprisingly).
Honestly, Apple is the new #2, but they've got a mountain ahead.
I feel stupid not having come to the same assessment after hearing about when the dates were set.
It's not like you just buy the data at Wal-Mart -- you have to negotiate licensing terms with Google and the terms that Google wanted were, reportedly, onerous.
That would mean the iPhone, the iPhone 3G, and the original iPad (none of which support iOS 6) will lose all mapping ability starting next year. Unless, of course, Apple backports their maps app to iOS 5 (and even that wouldn't help original iPhone users--if there are any left).
I can't imagine apple would have ever negotiated any deal where their maps simply stopped working when a contract expires.
I'm sure the deal takes into account legacy devices, but I wonder how long that extended support would last.
Apple Maps feel very snappy and I like the Yelp tie-in.
But I have never used the transit options so I can't say I'm missing it. If I had to use it I figure I could just jump over to web based google maps.
Curious to know what don't you like about the new apple maps that can't be solved by the web based google maps ?
Another thing that works better is integration with Siri. I felt that on Android there were a few more hoops to go through to do things like "drive to home" or "drive to Bob's Chicken Shack".
The things I don't like are the lack of detail on the maps currently. I don't use the satellite layer so it looks really sparse and I feel like I'm driving to big abstract blobs.
To be honest this is pretty good for a first try. Getting native turn-by-turn that works 95% of the time is pretty impressive.
It’s pretty clear by the amount of change (and Apple’s marketing efforts) that each OS 10.#.0 release is a "major" OS update, on par with the relative significance of each iOS #.0 release.
But Gruber may have over-generalized here. Indeed, Apple has added major new features in iOS .# updates, e.g. AirPlay and AirPrint in 4.2, or the Personal Hotspot feature in 4.3.
What they haven’t done is change key functionality in a point update, let alone introduce regressions. (In fact, before this incident, I’m struggling to recall Apple ever removing/crippling existing functionality.) If they were going to perform a full Maps switch-out, maybe they felt that now would be the best time, if only because there is so much positive press out there to temper the backlash.
Edit: Regarding removed features, I was mostly thinking of Apple’s record with iOS. As gurkendoktor points out, they have certainly removed ("simplified") functionality in Mac OS X, often creating great frustration.
My point is that version numbers for end-user software are borderline meaningless; they're marketing fodder. Just look at Chrome and Firefox, for example. Firefox didn't suddenly start improving 10x faster than it was before, but they changed their versioning scheme in a marketing play to compete with Chrome's ever-inflating version, as the casual user assumes that Chrome 37 must be much better than Firefox 6 because its major version is so much bigger.
Apple could either ship a regression in a new major, or ship a less broken regression in a new minor. In either case, there's going to be a regression. Regressions are unfortunate anytime they have to happen, but the assertion that you could only replace Google Maps with an in-house solution in a major is just silly post-hoc justification. You can't avoid disappointing users except by not shipping a regression at all, but you can lessen it by shipping a less-broken product.
As an aside, I can think of at least one other major breaking change/regression in a point release - the total swap in functionality of the lock/mute switch in iOS 4.2. There are also things like dropping support for older devices in point releases (4.3 dropped support for the iPhone 3G) that make the argument look even weaker; device deprecation is generally the sort of thing that is sacredly reserved for major releases, yet Apple seems to have had no problem doing it in a point release, and we're supposed to believe that yet somehow Apple wasn't willing to replace an app in a point release just because it isn't a major?
Mac OS X has had plenty of that. You buy a Mac Mini with a remote so you can use Front Row, and bam, Front Row's gone. But that is probably why Mac users are a lot more careful with updating their systems than iOS users are/were.
Which leads me to believe this was an upper management push and they are willing to deal with the PR fallout. beta 1 maps was really really bad, gm is workable. It has improved a ton during the betas, and that was a 2 month-ish spread. I'll give Apple a few months to clean up the data, it makes Core Location way more useful than when it was tied to Googles' api. Note this is for things like the vector road parts of the map, you can basically have your location clamped to the road. Sometimes gps signals are... erratic when driving in cities, this helps things out immensely. But we'll see if it is another ping or not.
Gruber says only:
>If Apple had stuck with Google Maps for another year they would have been forced to renegotiate with Google in a situation where both sides at the table would know that Apple ... had to agree to whatever terms Google demanded to extend the deal
Does Apple somehow have less leverage in the past? They can always use App Store gatekeeping as leverage. Perhaps Gruber is implying that Apple's antagonism towards Google's ally Samsung means it will receive unfavorable terms?
Even if Apple has to pay a bit more one would think it would be worth it given that Apple has lots of cash and the risk of shipping a poor maps implementation is losing further marketshare to Android.
But, that basically means that Apple has drastically regressed the user experience in order to force users to help them build a product so that one day it might be able to compete with the product that they were already using for years, and suffer through cruddy data in the meantime. And they expected people to be okay with this?
Google is so far ahead on mapping that I doubt Apple will ever catch up. You're talking about volunteer crowdsourced data versus a company that literally has a fleet of cars and employees out scouring the world and mapping it in detail. Unless Apple decides to make a major play in mapping - not just in iOS, but in building a first-class mapping product to compete with Google Maps - I doubt that they're ever going to have data that'll match peoples' friends' Android-based mapping experiences, and that's going to leave a lot of people very sour on what is supposed to be the premium-brand smartphone.
I have a number of friends and acquaintences who have either already switched or are soon switching from their iPhone 4 to some Android-flavored phone specifically because they're so disappointed with the iPhone 5 + iOS6 combination, and no longer feel like it's the best option on the market. Pissing people off and losing them as customers is a pretty terrible price to pay for wanting to gather bug reports on location data.
We're not talking rocket science here. If Apple wants to catch up to Google on mapping, they just have to invest time, money, and attention. We're talking at most two years for Apple to get where Google is today.
Basically removing the Maps app is one thing, removing new OS features that use the same frameworks is another.
But the elements of mapping that are not related to search, that is, routing, displaying tiles, walking directions, cycling directions, turn-by-turn, aerial-view, points of interests - these are all elements that internet data is less useful, and where being able to invest billions of dollars in acquiring suitable cartographic information (as Nokia did) should be sufficient to put together a world class map environment for the customer. My perspective on the challenges is mostly informed through several hours of reading historic postings here: http://blog.telemapics.com/?p=399
In all likelihood, after several billions of dollars invested, Apple 2014 will equal Google 2012 in the areas I just described (mapping sans search).
Think of web pages with POI data (store and restaurant locators are probably the tip of that iceberg), a long history of location-related searches including data from "front door" web searches, data on how the results of those searches were used (which Google uses to great effect in other places) and so on.