“In early 2017, a conversation with yet another Waze fanboy finally nudged me to start a navigation app experiment. I was skeptical that the Alphabet owned company could meaningfully best its parent’s home grown Google Maps,” Artur Grabowski writes for Arturrr. “I was also curious whether Apple Maps had discovered competence since its iOS 6 release.”
“I thus set out to answer three questions: Which navigation app estimates the shortest travel time? How does each app over/underestimate travel times? Which navigation app actually gets you to your destination most quickly?” Grabowski writes. “This exercise lasted the majority of 2017 and led me to dread almost any car trip due to the self imposed data gathering tasks that came with it. Nonetheless, my wife and I persevered, and I hope this data serves the community well.”
“Relative to Google Maps, Apple Maps estimated trip times were on average 8% longer (i.e worse) and Waze estimates are 3% shorter (i.e. better),” Grabowski writes. “Using Apple Maps, I on average arrived 1% faster than initially estimated, versus 2% slower with Google Maps and 11% slower with Waze. In other words, Apple sandbags its estimates so that users on average arrive at the predicted time or slightly sooner. Google and Waze are overly optimistic in their predictions and thus their users arrive later than expected.”
“If you want to get to your destination most quickly, use Google Maps,” Grabowski writes. “If you want an accurate prediction from your navigation app to help you arrive at your destination on time, use Apple Maps. If thinking you’ll get to your destination quickly helps to ease your commuter anxiety, use Waze.”
Much more in the full article – very highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: We commend Arthur for undertaking and completing such an arduous test!
Note that all of the data was collected in the San Francisco Bay Area, so, for the hundreds of millions outside that area, your mileage will vary.
Bottom line: Apple Maps was saddled with a poor first impression because Apple screwed up and didn’t release it with a “beta” tag. Apple Maps is better than its reputation suggests. If you haven’t tried Apple Maps lately, give it a try! If you have an Apple Watch, especially, you’ll want to give Apple Maps another chance.
As Arthur writes, “Waze (Alphabet) makes money through ads when you use their app. What better way to get people to use your navigation app than by over-promising short trip times when no one takes the time to record data and realize that you under-deliver? If an unsuspecting user opens Apple Maps and sees a 34-minute route and compares that to 30-minutes in Waze, the deed is done. Now Waze has a life-long customer who doesn’t realize they’ve been hoodwinked and Waze can throw at them stupidly annoying ads.”
[Attribution: MacStories. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Two comments:
First, I have been using Waze for years and I find it ALWAYS overestimates the time it takes me to get somewhere. I’m almost always beating it’s original duration by 1-5 minutes (depending on how far I’m driving).
But more importantly, Waze is crowd-sourced. That means that people contribute in real-time things like accidents, traffic congestion or police speed traps. I find this invaluable. AFAIK, Apple Maps does not have this. This makes it utterly useless for me. Waze will often redirect me as traffic conditions change. This is invaluable.
For now, I see no alternative to Waze.
It has been over a year since Apple Maps began re-routing the user when a faster way is available due to traffic conditions. I also appreciate their explicit lane suggestions which I find highly accurate. I live in the DC metro area. I travel frequently with Google and Waze users and I am reminded why my reliance on Apple Maps is best for me.
With Carplay Apple Maps is super fast and accurate. I suspect Apple Maps taps into the vehicle’s GPS signal rather than iphone, makes it a real pleasure and productive plan ahead tool.
If you adhere to the posted speed limits fairly well, then I have found ETAs from both Apple Maps and Google Maps to be pretty accurate. That leads me to suspect that you are a lead-foot and routinely drive around 8-10 mph over the posted speed limit. I somehow doubt that you actually come to a complete stop at stop signs most of the time, either.
A 40-mile trip at 60 mph takes 40 minutes.
A 40-mile trip at 70 mph takes 34.3 minutes, 5.7 minutes or 14.3% less.
Honestly, speeding does not really pay off for shorter trips. One stoplight can eliminate the potential time saved, and I despise the crazy drivers who routinely risk my safety out of ignorance or apathy.
For longer trips, though, an additional 10 mph on the average speed can cut several hours. For example, on a 1200 mile trip, averaging 70 mph rather than 60 mph saves 2.86 hours – analogous to cutting 170 miles off of the trip at the lower speed. as mileage, of course, drops because drag is a function of velocity squared.
I wonder if any of the three periodically adjust the arrival time similar to how I’ve seen car navigation systems in Japan do based on road conditions, speed and remaining distance.
One more thing: just because Google bought Waze doesn’t make Waze a Google product. Yes, they own it. But they didn’t create it (it was originally an Israeli company).
Tes, it is a Goggle product. it goggles everything you do.
How long do you think it took Google to bastardize it for its nefrarious datamining purposes?
By the “invented by someone else” logic,
iTunes isn’t an Apple product.
Accuracy of travel times is quite an important factor for me. Here in the UK I use a dedicated TomTom sat nav which uses my iPhone for traffic updates and it will frequently alert me to a faster alternative to the route originally planned, but in reality those faster routes are not necessarily any quicker than sticking with the original route and sometimes turn out to be slower.
Yesterday evening I travelled for just over two hours, covering 110 miles from the other side of London to my home starting out at the tail end of the rush hour and the eta predicted by my TomTom at the start of the journey was within two minutes of the time actually taken, which I thought was pretty impressive.
I prefer to use a sat nav instead of a mapping app in my iPhone because a sat nav never gets sidetracked by incoming phone calls or alerts and also a sat nav displays my exact speed, which is very important when I’m driving in a country where speeds are in kph, but my car has a speedometer showing mph.
I gave up on Waze a couple of years ago. It wasn’t at all reliable and I found it cumbersome to enter destinations. The only thing I missed about Waze was the alerts for temporary police speed traps, but even they were often gone by the time I passed that point.
San Francisco? Do the homeless encampments show up on all three apps?
I wonder when Waze will add the homeless poop locations.
The MDN lifelong grudge against Maps is long past tiresome.
I use Apple Maps as my main but I have to say it still lacks data. There’s places I couldn’t find on Apple Maps that I can find in google maps. Apple Maps got an entire shopping
Mall on the wrong place and I had to report on every single of them and still gets some issue. I also don’t know why Siri always suggest going freeway when a shorter route is available.
I love Apple Maps. It always gets me to where I’m going. Accuracy is more important to me than if I’m a minute early/late on a two-hour trip. What I’d be more interested in is having more choices in the “control box” on the main screen. I’d like to be able to quickly find a hospital or restaurant or entertainment venue if I’m on the road—not just coffee shops. Why not the full search range of choices?
I very much appreciate the visual depiction of which freeway lane I should get into when approaching an exit or turn—but even more, Siri verbalizes it so if I can’t look at the phone display I know which of 6 lanes to ease toward at a critical junction. Also, one can specify whether or not Siri should favor HOV commuter lanes or the regular ones which can save a lot of time near the (horrors!) LA area freeways.
Also, Waze frequently re-routes us when there’s a slowdown ahead but often after numerous small street detours, when re-entering the freeway it seems almost no time has been saved. Apple Maps tends to just stick with the original, simpler routing and even if it takes a minute or two longer than Waze, it is much more relaxing and hassle-free.
On my iPhone Apple maps works fine. Just yesterday I used Maps on the computer and found that the satellite image of my neighbor in NYC is over 5 years old. I can tell as trees that were knocked down by Hurricane Sandy are still in the image.
In my experience, Apple maps is spot on for directions and addresses. However, it sometimes doesn’t have any information. Google seems sometimes to have addresses on the wrong side of rural highways and roads. Inside cities, Google is spot on.
As far as times go, each is close enough not to matter, their errors are the difference between catching a few traffic lights or not.
Accuracy of time is one thing, accuracy of directions is another. I had to make a lengthy commute for a week. The first day I used Apple Maps, and it repeatedly sent me down streets that were closed for construction (and apparently had been for a while), whereas Waze guided me accurately. The first day took me almost an hour longer. I had had other mishaps with Apple’s directions, and stopped trusting them altogether.
Apple Maps usually works quite well for me, occasionally I’ll try Google of there are problems- but some locations are tricky no matter what. Most recently- Boston. Then again, easy to get lost there regardless of app or method of travel. And unlike NYC, people often can’t help you.
Comparing maps and navigation apps is, for the most part meaningless. Their accuracy varies quite a lot between regions; for SF, Waze may be more accurate and faster than GM or AM, but for NYC, AM could be noticeably better.
I quickly stopped using GM when it consistently underestimated the time it would take to get somewhere. I don’t like being late for things, and if I trust Google Maps, and leave at the last minute, I am guaranteed to be late.
Apple Maps makes more accurate estimations using NYC’s public transport. There are frequent moments when Google overestimates the time needed to transfer from subway to bus, causing me to miss the connection (and thus delay the trip by 3 – 8 minutes, depending on the day).
Apple Maps is useless in Poland, I automatically go to Google Maps or the “Jak dojade” (how to get there) app for transit in Warsaw.
Poland is still a third world country money wise.
Hardly
Every maps is almost useless in Indonesia. They can’t cope with sudden change. and often use the main road only where traffic is always there
yes, Apple Maps will probably be useless outside of places like San Francisco and New York for a long time.
Maps does as well as anybody and its covenient on my iPhone, so I am not complaining.
Data maybe not so good, but no worse than anyone else.
I live 2 miles outside of my city limits, but to drive to that particular 2 mile closet point is actually a 10 mile drive because there are 2 1000 ft deep canyons in between, our street names were laid out by flatlanders. We have 5 different Elm Streets, none of which connect directly with each other but were named 100 years ago even though they should not have been named the same since there was no way they could ever connect due to topography.
If you install Waze and never check settings, Google has it set to track Location “Always”.
Good old Google watching your back and killing your battery.
I’ve often wondered how many people bitch about their iPhone battery life and never check for apps that use the GPS all the time.
I still refuse to trust Apple Maps while it says my street is one way after I’ve repeatedly tried to tell them it’s not.
I am as Apple fanboy as they come, but when I am out and about I use Waze, because of one feature. About two years ago, I was driving home from the airport and had an eighteen wheeler in front of me and cars on either side. All of a sudden, from underneath the eighteen wheeler, a giant piece of thrown tire tread appeared. It was not from that truck, but having the truck in front of me prevented me from being able to see it. I hit it at 70 and did $800 in damage to the front of my car. Waze alerts you to “Object on road ahead.” That is why I use it. Now, I hope my next car has Apple CarPlay so that may change, but for now, Waze it is.
Did Waze alert you to the object ahead was that truck which you were following much too closely which prevented the flying tire from losing its elevation which would have allowed it to pass underneath your car or else get thrown to the side?
I interpreted shieldzee saying that the tire in the road was hidden by the truck ahead not thrown up by it since those vehicles have much higher ground clearance than your average consumer vehicle. I understood “thrown tire tread” as tire tread that has separated from the vehicle that it was originally on and not necessarily bouncing around the road.
You might be correct, but the point is that it’s not a Waze issue per se; It’s a “driver following too closely to truck ahead” issue which prevented the driver havig enough time to react to avoid it.
I’ve been taught to keep at least a ‘2 second’ distance between yourself and the car ahead. In this case however the speed was 70mph, and he was boxed in by cars on either side. Not sure how much avoiding he could have done.
As Waze is the only one that crowd sources alerts like “Object on road ahead” it is the one he prefers. This of course also depends on other ‘earlier’ drivers having reported the object in the first place. Assuming that the info was available, Waze would have helped avoid the mishap by giving an alert far earlier than the time drivers keep between vehicles. AM and GM have no similar feature so would have been of no use in avoidance in his scenario.
From what I gather, he helped to box himself in by following too closely; He could have slowed down to do as you suggest or else not speeded up to catch up with the rear of the truck, right?
That would be reasonable. It is also possible that traffic conditions were such that everyone was travelling at relatively the same speed. Keeping yourself from being boxed in in the first place is always a good idea though. I was taught to keep yourself staggered if possible from adjacent cars. Don’t know how many ‘educated’ drivers there are around.
Not comparing apples to apples. Waze provides user-driven feedback, including, and most importantly, location of police. This is invaluable when on long drives. Until Apple Maps provides this, no reason to switch.
I Dumped Waste after the umpteenth time it got me lost. Never ever use Waze if you do not know the area. Decent for commuting but total garbage for long distance. It also routes you through strange areas and the wrong direction. I used to think it was to force you past some advertisers shop.
Browsed the article and was not overly impressed with analytical methods. Arturrr should show minutes and seconds units along with percentages. Also, did he report whether there a statistically significant difference between mean estimate travel times (and also between mean actual travel times) for each map app? Lastly, one-third of all trips is basically his commute? Not sure that constitutes a random sample…
You could view the commute trips as a more controlled sample since it eliminates at least one variable to differences measured.
I use Apple Maps and Waze at the same time with Waze as an underlay to the Apple Maps. I really like the crowd sourcing solution of Waze. On long trips, it’s difficult to do one wihtout the other.
I just had to deal with Apple Maps not having an address up to date after 4 years.
What’s the deal with the link to read more taking us to a protected reader?
Protected: Apple Maps vs. Google Maps vs. Waze
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