Tuesday, August 28, 2018
Apple maps in the loosest sense of the word
Apple maps in the loosest sense of the word
The new Apple iOS6 release has led to a wave of map related hysteria. Theres a terrific Tumblr thats doing a great job of compiling some fantastic carto-gaffes in the new Apple maps app. My current favorite...
BBC News gives Apples maps a pretty rough ride as do any number of others including Apple Insider and Gizmodo. Its all very amusing and, one suspects, Google are having a pleasant day at the office having been dropped on iOS6 in favour of Apples own map app. But what are we actually seeing?
Were seeing a company renowned for highly polished product pushing out a poor map and that in itself is feeding the sneering hordes. Sub-standard product would make Steve Jobs turn in his grave but it proves one thing...making a solid, accurate, searchable, well designed and useable online map (and one that works well on a mobile device) is no easy game. You cant do it quickly and if you dont know what youre doing youre going to make the sort of errors that were seeing. Lets not forget though, Googles own initial efforts were ridiculed and they had their own carto-gaffes in the early days...poorly matched satellite imagery, administrative boundaries in the wrong place, labels poorly positioned...not to mention the awful colours, layout and the fact that most of the known world was missing initially.
The problem for Apple is they need to react quickly to get their map app up to speed. Google have had 7 years of development. They have learnt a lot in that time, not least that cartography is not easy. Apples initial offering seems to suggest theyve poured their map data into a really agricultural and restrictive set of styles. Theyve done precious little error checking and none of that manual grunt work required to iron out the problems so were seeing all manner of missing or incorrectly located POIs, weak navigation and search, terrible satellite imagery...an even worse hybrid satellite/map effort and more. Itll be interesting to see how they improve on their map app over the coming months and years but of course...everyone else has a huge head start and will be working on their own products.
Quite simply, Apple dropped the ball on this one and didnt appreciate the difficulty of making a good map that people can use. With maps and location being absolutely central to how we use mobile devices this is potentially a really big deal. I suspect many will simply not upgrade to iOS6 or will just overcome the mild inconvenience of launching a web browser to hit a better map....or they may just wait until Google publish their own Google iO6 map app in the Apple store which will just make Apples job even harder.
Me? I use Android...
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