Comment by btown
10 hours ago
Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:
> “When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy,” said Ternus. “But the team had just been over the years just pushing and pushing and pushing. And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing. If you have the vision and you're persistent and you keep working at it, you can take something you know that has a rocky start and turn it into something great.”
Here's hoping he recognizes that Apple's current generation of software is in the "rocky start" phase, not the "pushing and pushing" phase and definitely not the "absolutely amazing" phase. Time will tell...
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/apples-joz-and-ternus-on...
>And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing.
Perhaps that is the case in the US, but in Poland, I haven't had a single app guide me into the literal bushes as many times as Apple Maps does. The straw that broke the camel's back was when, I shit you not, the navigation aspect literally expected me to drive through a lake.
There's some irony there in that the whole maps fiasco lead to firing of Forstall which allowed Ive to become head of design, which basically led to the current state of macOS design.
I do wish that some day someone will tell the story of what happened during that time. Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat". It still feels to me Forstall was set up as the fall guy, especially considering no one was fired for antennagate.
> Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat".
Absolutely.
Was the choice to release way way way too early the right choice in the end? Needed telemetry, or even more time, to beat Google? Also taking the data from Google must have had significant ramifications.
Reportedly, Forstall wasn’t liked by the other senior execs but was kept “safe” as Jobs’ protégé, they thought alike and shared the love for skeuomorphism design. Ive in particular disliked Forstall, and Tim Cook made a choice.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apples-minimalist-ive-assume...
Could Forstall potentially return under new Apple leadership?
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Forstall fired an engineer I had worked with (and who I respected a lot) to take the fall for Apple Maps.
Like one engineer could ever be responsible for that epic of a fiasco?
I’m sure it’s amazing in California or the US. So often I think how much better products would be if the people responsible would have to use them for a week outside of the happy path.
Example: Taking the airport train instead of a private driver and realizing there’s no luggage racks, staying in a regular hotel room and realizing there’s no light in front of the mirror, only behind you. So many examples like that on a daily basis.
Another huge exemple : in most big cities in Europe you have special parking lots around big public transit hubs outside of the city where you can park for free as long as you continue your journey by public transit.
In a lot of cities, that’s either the fastest or the most comfortable way to go somewhere in the city when you come from the outside.
Not any single navigation app support this (tbf, the few European ones don’t support it either)
Staying in a holiday rental and there are no hooks on the walls!
I’ve started buying cheap self-adhesive hooks on AliExpress and placing them myself. Not sure if they last long but hopefully owners get the message.
“When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy…”
And I know many engineers within Apple that had been testing Maps before it shipped and they were filing bugs about it. It shipped anyway.
> It shipped anyway.
“Real artists ship”
No product worth using is bug free.
No product is bug free. Are all products worth using?
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I mean the problem was the Google contract, yeah?
Apple Maps is pretty fantastic
It’s gotten a lot better, but I still find the address database better in Google Maps, which helps when you have only a fragment of an address. I also find that the Apple Maps database has a lot of roads that read the same. For instance, in Texas where I live, we have a lot of “Ranch Roads” that are numbered. Think of them like state highways in other state (which we also have; don’t ask). For whatever reason, most of the Ranch Roads are spoken by Maps as “Ranch Road,” not with the number. So, if you have a spot where multiple Ranch Roads intersect, Maps will just say “turn left on Ranch Road” instead of “turn left on Ranch Road 123.” It’s tremendous annoying. In another state, imagine it saying “turn left on Interstate,” without a number. Anyway, Google Maps does better.
Google is not without its errors.
I used to work to resolve addressing disputes and google just doesn't expose (maybe even store) the relevant information for a lot of parcels of land.
It’s all available freely from the government in simple formats but for Joe Public they don’t know that much less how to access it and it’s the case that technicians on the ground don’t always have it in their SOP either. Google has a level of market dominance that means their errors can be, for a small individual or over an aggregation of small individuals, costly.
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Google Maps often picks the non-idiomatic thing. It'll say the road name when no sign uses that, and it's a US highway that you have been following for a while. Or it will tell you the state highway number when it is a major named artery, and nobody knows that it is a state highway at that point or uses the highway number. This makes it hard to know if it is carrying you along on the same route or if it has come up with one of its weird shortcuts to save 1 minute.
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On macOS there are so many basic things you’d want to do - share itineraries, annotate places, keep lists of things, but there’s not even a document concept. With the exception of guides, anything you do is ephemeral. It’s excellent at planning a route, but doing anything with that route, including getting back to it later is useless.
All true, but you have to measure it against how enshitified Google Maps has become.
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The app on macOS is terrible, like all Catalyst/SwiftUI ports. Fisher-Price software.
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Maybe elsewhere it is. Here, it's terrible.
In general, for all it benefits from globalization, Apple disappoints on global markets.
In the US. In many other countries it's borderline useless.
I haven't used google maps in years.
90% of my usage of it is because it actually displays the map on my Watch, whereas Google Maps & Citymapper only show directions.
If it weren't for that, I'd use Citymapper for practically everything.
It’s okay. It’s still subpar and barely keeping pace with Gmaps
it was far inferior to its competitor when it was released
That was, what, twelve years ago? Hardly seems relevant.
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And they just added ads.
That's worrying, because Apple Mpas is still a borderline useless hot mess.
What is he smoking?!? Apple Maps was fine a few years ago, but these days it routes me to the wrong place about as often as organic maps, and siri is completely broken. It renders a blue dot showing where I am, and responds “I do not know where you are”.
Also, the UI for it keeps getting more cluttered, and they announced that in-map ads are coming Q2-3 2026.