

IOS Maps and China - joshus
http://anthonydrendel.com/blog/2012/9/24/ios-maps-and-china.html

======
jeremymims
Meanwhile, searching for a Broadway address a few blocks away from the
Manhattan Apple Store in SoHo led to directions to Broadway in Brooklyn, NY.

I've used Apple products since 1993 (Centris 610) and even owned a Powerbook
G3 trapped on ADB and a G4 Cube. I've put up with all sorts of weirdness from
Apple over the years.

The point of technology is to help you do your job better. I saw my future of
late meetings, getting lost on my way to meet clients in towns I've never
seen, and missing flights during my travels.

I turned around and walked out without a new iPhone 5.

~~~
ricardobeat
A shame, that phone can run the Google Maps webapp pretty well.

I'm getting the feeling that most problems with the new Maps come from it's
subpar recommendation/auto-correct engine, which (unsurprisingly) is great in
Google maps. It gets thing right if you type exact, complete addresses, but
can fail miserably on basic queries.

~~~
bad_user
It's difficult to operate the Google Maps website on the small screen of a
phone. On the other hand, it works well on an iPad. After I installed iOS 6, I
added a shortcut to Google Maps on the desktop. Works great.

------
kalleboo
If I zoom in one more step than he did on Google Maps, I see the same POIs as
on his Apple map. And the copyright on maps.google.com is... "AutoNavi", the
same provider he praises.

I agree that Apple have done a better presentation here by showing more data
at a further zoom level. It's the exact opposite of my experience of Apple
Maps here in Japan - I have to zoom in to absurd levels just to see train
tracks (which should be on par with freeways IMO)

~~~
harisenbon
(Japan) My wife had updated her iPhone to iOS6 and we were using it to go to
the next city over. Not only are the stations, trainlines and street names not
listed unless you zoom in right on top of them, there are no traffic signals
or intersection names.

The font that they chose for the area names is also incredibly wide, which
works well for something like "Brooklyn" but not for a name as long as
"KakamigaharaHonmachi," which is pretty standard for a Japanese town.

Everyone I've talked to in Japan who has upgraded regrets it.

~~~
snogglethorpe
> _Everyone I've talked to in Japan who has upgraded regrets it._

... and yesterday I saw a rather long prime-time Japanese TV news piece about
how screwed up Apple's iOS6 maps are, where the reporter was travelling around
to various places in Tokyo and showing how crazily Apple maps misrepresented
them...

So the story's clearly made the jump from something techies know about to
general news, just when all the resellers are trying hard to get people
excited about the iphone 5...

------
chaz
I zoomed in on the area around the author's location and I'm seeing a fair
amount of detail surfacing, as well as most of the same locations that are
visible on the iOS 6 map. Is it possible that Apple is showing more detail
farther away whereas Google requires a tighter zoom?

<http://goo.gl/maps/ZQSzI>

~~~
milesskorpen
... and I can't even find that area in Apple Maps. I zoom in moderately far,
and the whole map seems empty.

------
dageshi
Of more interest to me would be whether the apple maps are being deliberately
offset like the google ones are. You can't accurately use GPS with google maps
in China because the map tiles are shifted by some arbitrary amount.

[https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/m...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/maps/zVmRao1Im3w)

You can see it very clearly if you visit the Hong Kong/Shenzhen border on
google maps and toggle between map & satellite, the border is a complete mess
with large parts of the Mainland side appearing on the Hong Kong side.

I've always assumed this was a deliberate thing by the Chinese government (one
way or another), I wonder if apple have got away without such treatment?

~~~
olalonde
It is apparently required by the Chinese government, see comment thread here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4548840>

------
beering
Is it just me, or do the two examples look pretty similar? Apple Maps shows a
few more businesses, but the street data look more or less equivalent.

Find me some examples where Apple Maps is complete and detailed and Google
Maps has nothing.

~~~
ricardobeat
Not that exaggerated, but here you go (Porto Alegre, Brazil):
<http://cl.ly/image/300n11462G0U>

Bonus: if you look closely at the bottom, iOS Maps shows a clear bifurcation
while Google just merges it into a blob.

------
kulpreet
I noticed this over the summer when I was in Beijing/Shanghai with the iOS 6
beta. As soon as I got on the Chinese cell network, the maps suddenly changed
to the AutoNavi maps, which although they turned out to be significantly more
useful, they weren't vector-based maps and you couldn't rotate them like Apple
maps. I also noticed a few other things like I no longer had access maps of
any other country and after comparing the maps to the Google Maps in China on
my locked iOS 5 phone, the AutoNavi maps were SIGNIFICANTLY more useful (and
even saved me when I was lost one time).

------
MetalMASK
Interesting point but I'd like to see some feedback from real Chinese user(s).
(although I am Chinese, I am not currently physically in China so cannot test
it out).

The major difference between the two maps is that the Apple one has more POIs
(and it looks even more cluttered because it contains Chinese characters). As
noted by beering, the base map are essentially the same in this particular
example. IOS6 maps are criticized for missing spatial features in the base map
(i.e., road network, waterbodies, .etc), which largely due to the use of OSM
instead of commercial database.

I am not seeing a counter example here. The comparison is even based on
different map range (note the IOS6 map covers a larger region than the google
map example).

What I've heard is that Google maps works really bad in some rural part of
Europe, e.g., South France. Maybe look for some examples there.

------
fpgeek
Yes, China is going to pass the US as the world's largest smartphone market.
And if Apple's maps genuinely are better than Google's in China (something
people are arguing about in this thread), that's to their credit.

That being said, it is important to put this in perspective. While the overall
Chinese smartphone market will soon be larger than the US smartphone market,
the portion currently addressable by Apple (people who will buy a smartphone
that costs 450 USD and up and won't support 3G on the largest carrier) is
much, much smaller. Improved maps can't be a significant part of a plan to
address this because they have no impact on the bigger issues.

Show me a cheap iPhone with TD-SCDMA and I'll agree that Apple is serious
about the Chinese market. Until then...

~~~
michelleclsun
I am a Hong Kong native and lived in Beijing, and traveled for work in
Shenzhen and Shanghai extensively. I agree that the population that can afford
an iphone in China is still a small portion. However, I believe a cheaper
iPhone with TD-SCDMA may not be a viable solution for Apple to the Chinese
market for two reasons.

a) The amount of craze and worship to Apple products in key cities surpasses
any reasonable level. People are willing to pay, a mark up of 58% - 98% markup
in the grey market in Shenzhen. In fact, there are businesses in Hong Kong
that built around hiring cheap labor to line up in Apple Store and carrying
the iPhones across the border for a quick turnaround of arbitraging prices.
[1]

 _It took little more than five hours for the first Apple iPhone 5s to go on
sale in China after being smuggled across the border from Hong Kong, but
supplies were short and prices high._

 _For anyone able to secure one, the new phone cost HK$5,588 ($720), or the
equivalent of around 4,545 yuan, at the Hong Kong Apple store, while they were
selling for between 7,500 yuan [$1140] and 9,000 yuan [$1427] in the litter-
strewn building in Shenzhen where fake and smuggled phones are often hawked._
[2]

b) It is always been Apple's strategy to price high and capture a customer
segment with high willingness to pay. The app store revenue has significantly
higher share of revenue for fewer app downloads versus android. "..the App
Store leads with a revenue share of 71% (compared to 29% for Android) even
though total downloads through Google Play accounts for 35% of the total,
versus 28% for iOS. * [3]

[1] [http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-
apple/2012/09/smuggled...](http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-
apple/2012/09/smuggled-iphones-reach-mainland-china-more.html)

[2] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/21/iphone-5-in-
china_n...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/21/iphone-5-in-
china_n_1902833.html?utm_hp_ref=technology)

[3] [http://www.imore.com/ios-app-store-generates-double-
google-p...](http://www.imore.com/ios-app-store-generates-double-google-plays-
revenue-app-downloads)

------
jeromeflipo
Is there any difference between those two maps? It seems that all Apple's POIs
are on Google Maps, except with bigger font and symbols. Also, the Apple Maps
screenshot shows a maps that is more zoomed in.

It also looks like Apple shows the local translations of the roads and POIs
names - contrary to Google Maps, but this difference could be from the
language preference of the app or OS?

Seriously, who would make a judgment based on those mere screenshots?

I wish <http://41latitude.com> was back online. It had the best maps
comparisons every published, but Justin O'Beirne closed it when he joined
Apple's Maps team few years ago.

------
bane
A little over a decade ago I was working for a company that needed map data
for Beijing to produce some wall maps. We quickly found out that, at least
with the dozen or so geospatial data providers we contacted at the time, the
data we wanted was simply not available in the West (if it even existed at
all)! The rumor in the industry was that the Chinese government didn't want
accurate map data to leave the country for fear that it would be used for
military planning purposes by invading powers.

All was almost a disaster until a co-worker returned from a year in Beijing
and brought a small stack of locally produced paper maps of the city back with
him, with careful notes where they were "not accurate". We kept 4 or 5 interns
busy for a summer converting the various paper maps into digital vector data
we were able to use with our GIS systems.

So the fact that less than a generation later, people are complaining that the
iOS maps lack sufficient detail of the countryside or whatever is almost
mindboggling to me.

On a similar note, recent travels in Seoul have also reminded me how bad our
GPS systems are no matter the provider. The average GPS most people use to get
around with has astonishing levels of detail[1] by anyone's standards. Would
that google maps had that level of detail even in just big cities I'd be
amazed.

[1] - Some sample screenshots <http://www.navigadget.com/index.php/tag/inavi>
and yes, they do really look that good.

 _edit_ this is pretty good <http://map.baidu.com/>

------
matthewrudy
For most of the prefecture level cities I've searched for I find nothing.

Kunming, Maoming, Sanya, Zhanjiang, Nanning, Nanchang, ...

It's only the big international cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan,
Guangzou, Shenzhen, that appear.

~~~
amartya916
I think if you view that data from outside China, it's not visible. That is,
the details show up only while searching from within China.

~~~
kevin_p
And vice versa. If you're in China, you only get the most basic details for
other countries - my hometown Oldham in the UK (population ~100,000) doesn't
appear at all; nearby Rochdale is there but has no roads. And there are no
satellite maps at all for anywhere outside China (except Taiwan and other
places claimed by the PRC).

------
AllenKids
I'm in China right now, and yes Google Maps is shit, at least in China. The
AutoNav Maps iOS 6 utilizes is quite a bit better.

That been said, in China the one map you have to beat is Baidu, and I see
Apple still have a long way to go.

~~~
glasslion
Baidu Map is not shit only if you download and store 10G+ map data on your
phone

~~~
AllenKids
The same goes for every navigation apps in China, the 3G speed and coverage is
just not there yet.

------
skeletonjelly
Sorry can you fix the title to "iOS" not "IOS" please? They paid a lot of
money to Cisco, might as well distinguish and get some branding value!

~~~
pooriaazimi
He can't, because of HN's stupid auto-capitalization.

But fortunately, there's a hack: change it to " iOS ..." (an space at the
beginning)

------
s_henry_paulson
If the places shown on the map are actually in those locations, then yes, I am
very impressed.

------
spitx
>"I'm talking about those of us who live in China (you know, the place with
1.3+ billion people and the second-largest economy in the world)."

This claim is preposterous. There are 1.241 billion in India and Hindi is not
even supported in the ios6.

<http://i.cubeupload.com/kTSpGM.jpg>

As others have pointed out, the granularity on Google Maps is not one bit
poorer.

<http://i.cubeupload.com/3Dj8kk.jpg>

Google seems to be using AutoNavi as well, for this region.

<http://i.cubeupload.com/EqvYMX.jpg>

I don't know what your're talking about.

Make an effort to be elaborate.

As the late Richard Holbrooke used to say: "Know something about something.
Don’t just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass
knowledge and offer it around."

~~~
liotier

      > There are 1.241 billion in India and
      > Hindi is not even supported in the ios6.
    

Only one third of the people of India speak Hindi. That's still 400 million
people, but India's highly multilingual environment makes localization choices
more complicated.

