Well, this is awkward: I'm about to enthuse at you about how and why Apple Maps is very good, but the impetus came when my wife Angela offered to pick me up from a meeting in Kings Heath, Birmingham (in England, for those not familiar with the place). I shared my location with her over Messages and was just thinking how handy this was, how straightforward and easy it was -- when she texted back "why are you in Stechford?"
Stechford is more than six miles away.
Now, you know that all map apps have trouble in cities, and Birmingham is a big city, so you can regularly find it hard to get an accurate GPS signal. Yet I had already been using Apple Maps, I had used it to show me walking directions to my meeting, and it had worked perfectly. You have to suspect that my finger slipped somewhere in the message to my wife, but if that's better than Apple Maps being wrong, it still means Apple Maps isn't as clear and easy to use as I thought.
Can we put this behind us, though? Call it a blip? Because usually, I so automatically turn to Apple Maps that I forget I've still got the
Google Maps app on my iPhone. I so automatically turn to Apple Maps that I no longer have the
TomTom navigation software, which cost me so much money about an hour before Apple Maps came out. It has easily, and readily, become routine to get into my car and say "Hey, Siri, take me home."
That's undoubtedly a big part of my defaulting to using Apple Maps: the fact that Siri and iOS default to using it. You could, and I have, separately opened the Google Maps app and worked with it, but it is definitely true that the integration of Apple's mapping tool onto my iPhone is a treat.
Nonetheless, I like it. The last time it let me down badly was when I was driving to a very confusing and built-up area. It turns out I was near where I wanted to go, but I couldn't see that from Apple Maps -- or, you know, outside the car window -- so I did turn to Google Maps. And I went blank. I did not know how to use the latest version of Google's map app. Couldn't see what slides in from the side, what I type, or how to tell it that I was close so I wanted walking directions, please.
I'm not proud of this, yet I'll admit it: Apple Maps had annoyed me, but I sat in that car and I shouted at Google Maps. It was nothing to do with navigating to my destination, it was all to do with how hard I found it to navigate around the app. There's an oversized white button just above an oversized blue one that either has a car or double arrows in it. I had no clue what the white one did. It turns out it snaps the map to your current location -- meaning you have to then schlep back to wherever you had just been looking.
If you want directions from somewhere other than your current location, you do it in Google Maps by dragging the map. Not the pin. You drag the map, while the pin says in the centre. Google's screen showing your next turn has two different ways to show you the one after. When the blue button has a car in it, that doesn't mean start the route. Sometimes you can swipe controls in from the left, sometimes you can't. Is it one tap or two to get cancel button? I have to think and to experiment every time I want to get out of the route and back to entering places.
I quit them both, and got out of the car to ask someone for directions.
Yet if that tells you Apple Maps goes wrong, let it also tell you that Google Maps goes wrong too. When these apps can't tell you what you want to know, a pretty interface is no help. It's just that I find Google's interface to be such a problem that when I get through it and then it gives me wrong directions, it is beyond annoyance, it is up there in the kind of murderous rage that only software can make you feel.
I can't count the number of times Apple Maps has got me where I'm going, shown me where I am, and given me just what I needed in order to plan the best route around everywhere I have to go. I like the very clean and crisp look of the maps: Google seems so much busier, and TomTom now seems garish. Garmin looks like you're driving through a cartoon.
I love how Apple Maps will smoothly change from a 3D to a 2D view when you're approaching a traffic island or a junction. You don't ask it to, it just knows when the 2D view will give you a clearer idea of where you're going to be turning. I like how I can ask Siri to check for texts and messages. It's not so great that Siri stays on its grey page when you're done, but if you again say "what's my ETA?" Siri will tell you, and then switch back to the map view. Handy tip, that, you should tell Siri to make a note of it.
There's no denying that I miss Street View. Not enough to bother with loading a Street View app I once bought, but it is a killer feature on Google Maps. Apple's 3D rendering of buildings and roads looks much better to me, but it hasn't the detail and you can't quite pinch in as closely as you'd like.
That's true even on the Mac version of Apple Maps, but there you do get to play with Flyover. If Street View is handy for pinpointing where you're going, then Flyover is more for where you want to go. I have watched the London Eye turning on the latest release of the London Flyover. I have virtually walked the streets of New York, for no good reason.
I've also -- many, many times -- looked up somewhere on Apple Maps on my Mac, and sent the directions to my iPhone. Look it up here, get in the car, start driving. Fantastic feature.
Neither Google Maps nor Apple Maps let me nudge my route a different way, they won't let me avoid a problem coming up, they won't let me say I don't want to go via the highway. That's an astonishing failing, and it's especially galling with Google -- because the web version of that has exactly this feature.
I have the
Traveline GB app for getting me around Birmingham's public transport system, I have both
Where To? and
LocalScope for finding businesses and services wherever I am. I use mapping apps a great, great deal -- and I keep coming back to Apple Maps.
So does Angela, and she's a far better driver than I am.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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