Don’t get me wrong, while I was raised on Macs, I’m not a fanboy, and Apple does some things that really annoy me, but people have latched on to this meme to a ridiculous level.

And equally deserving of criticism are the suppliers of their data, frankly, not just Apple for selecting those suppliers.

OSM is about the database, not the tile renders. The ones on openstreetmap.org are busy, cluttered and badly designed. Currently the most useful and clean interface I have found is the one I posted above http://maps.skobbler.com/ – but there are several others notably http://open.mapquest.co.uk/

Unfortunately, all us mortals can do is guess. I look forward to some day finding out what actually went on behind the scenes. I’m sure both companies were trying as hard as they possibly could to screw each other. But obviously Google won this round.

On the other hand the open street map simply is hard to read. It looks cluttered, fonts are difficult to read and the extensive colour palate is distracting.

I like the idea, but legibility is extremely important for maps and OSM just isn’t in the same ball park.

All of those things are immensely useful and valuable information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8

By the way- no advertisements on my android.

Enjoy your new imaps.

Ba-dump pssshhhhh.

Google, presumably, knows how much trouble they went to to get Google Maps to where it is, and how fast they think that they can make it better. If they suspect that Apple will iron out the important stuff fast, leaving only a few cute easter eggs(like the giant crushed bug somewhere in germany on google maps), then Google is pretty likely to fold and release an IOS6 standalone map app(if Apple lets them, of course). 

If they know that they’ve been sweating blood and buying up specialist data providers for the last N years to get where they are, letting Apple swing will start looking quite attractive. 

I suspect that it will, partially, depend on the customer response. If customers jump on the ‘help them fix it’ train, the pain points could get cleaned up pretty fast. If they adopt a ‘I paid premium money for a premium experience and I got this? Steve is truly dead!’ attitude, Apple will have to really bulk up on fix-it interns.

Which is a shit thing for them to do. You search for a local burger place, it keys off the word burger, and tries to route you to a McDonald’s instead. Extra taps to abort the advertisement so you can get to where you really want to go is seriously annoying.

But they made a good test, as I wanted to drive to an address near Burger King. 

Siri recognized Burger King (which surprised me, as it is easily confused by Germans using English), but then went on to direct me to an address some 35 km away.

Oh, I have to correct myself: If I do an textual search in the app itself, it shows all three restaurants.

Still bad, as one of the main selling points is telling Siri where to drive. 

Also, the map server is down. No map. No directions.  Well, iOS launches to tend to kill services for a couple of hours. 

Bottom line is Apple was reliant upon a competitors application and they needed to get out from under that relationship. If anything, Apple is too late and too short in this round.

When I created WiFiMaps.com in March ’02 (before Google Maps), we used TIGER from the US Census (With Mapserver/OGR/GDAL). It was necessary to do a lot of processing on the layers to strip out the non-important data, and try tons of things to get the streets to line-up with the aerial imagery. There was still some odd artifacts, and it did help to have feedback from the users.

WiFiMaps was me and another dude. Apple and Google have thousands of employees. This stuff is still new, so give ‘em a break.