“Some love it, some tolerate it, some ridicule it, and some have all but abandoned it,” Richard Devine writes for iMore. “When Apple made the decision to cut their Google-ties and go it alone with their own mapping service, it was a gutsy move. Google Maps makes people feel safe; it’s been around for so long and offered so freely it’s become the de-facto map service for many, many people.”
“Apple Maps launched to something of a fiasco. The issues were well documented, to the point CEO Tim Cook issued a public apology, acknowledging that Maps wasn’t up to scratch, and that they would keep working at it until it was the same quality product you come to expect from Apple,” Devine writes. “That said, all navigation services have problems. It’s incredibly hard to ingest, aggregate, cleanse, and sanitize that much information, and keep it updated. Anyone who uses GPS/sat-nav routinely will come across occasional problems, be it with TomTom, Nokia HERE, Google Maps, Garmin/Navigon, Co-Pilot, Waze, etc. It’s the overall quantity of errors, the egregiousness of them, and the time it takes to fix them that matters.”
Devine writes, “Personally, I’m a Google Maps user, and for very specific reasons. But, I do appreciate that Apple is working hard to refine a product that is still only 12 months old, and is competing against much older, more refined products. Whether or not Apple can overcome initial bad impressions and get people to try them again… is the question.”
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