
Google Set to Release iOS Maps App Tonight  - azazo
http://allthingsd.com/20121212/google-set-to-release-ios-maps-app-tonight/
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ericlevine
That's very good of Google to release the new maps app before the end of the
holiday shopping season. If I were an Android executive at Google, I'd be
fuming that they're providing a workaround to the broken software of their
biggest competitor going into such an important season for selling phones.

~~~
dubcanada
What does that have to do with anything? Google is going to sell the exact
same amount of phones with or without Google Maps on iOS.

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TamDenholm
How do Google get their apps like this approved? Indie developers get rejected
all the time for replicating a function that an apple app already does, but
google has chrome and others and now maps?

If Apple want to distance themselves from Google, surely they could just not
approve any of their apps.

~~~
saurik
Apple made a decision at some point (seemingly under pressure) to allow not
just Chrome, but all "browsers" (a term that I feel needs to be put in quotes,
as all of these applications, including Chrome, must use Apple's HTML
renderer, and only thereby have control over some aspects of how requests are
cached and the surrounding UI).

~~~
statictype
Hasn't Apple allowed browser apps that wrap UIWebKit well before Chrome?

I'm pretty sure there were already stand-alone browser apps in the App Store
before Chrome came.

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marknutter
There were for sure. Opera is one.

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ynniv
Opera Mini is not a browser but rather a view into a browser in The Cloud. All
network connections and JavaScript evaluation happens elsewhere, and the phone
displays the resulting image and proxies clicks back to the server. Apple's
sticking point has always been code evaluation on the phone, and currently
only permits JavaScriptCore to evaluate code retrieved over the network.

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kgrin
Curious whether it'll actually have the voice nav, which was (apparently?
allegedly?) at issue in the first place.

I guess we will (might?) find out soon enough.

~~~
mcrider
Voice nav would be the only reason I'd use Apple Maps; If google maps has it
I'm certainly switching back.

~~~
randomdata
Without Siri integration, it loses the real appeal of Apple's voice navigation
system. Being able to say things like "I need gas", or "take me home" without
taking attention away from the road are what really sell the voice navigation
on the device, in my opinion.

I realize Google has been adding their own voice recognition to their apps,
but there is no easy way to activate it without having to look at the screen;
a no-go while driving.

~~~
paul9290
Have you tried Google's updated voice search app? I find it to be a better
experience then, though unfortunately it's not built into the iPhone.

Google is awesome at software. Apple is awesome at hardware, I wish the two
weren't competing, as the iPhone was better when they weren't competitors.

~~~
randomdata
I have, and was quite impressed with the results, but without the integration
found no practical purpose. The point of Siri, to me, is to not have to touch
your phone at all. Something Google is unable to deliver on Apple hardware,
unfortunately.

As an aside, I tried using the voice search in the YouTube app today and it
wasn't working at all.

 _> Google is awesome at software. Apple is awesome at hardware_

I think it would be better said that Apple is awesome at software, Google is
awesome at data. Apple hardware, while nice, is nothing to phone home about on
its own. I'm not sure an iPhone loaded with Android would really sell all that
well.

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jaytaylor
The article was kind of confusing to me..

Does "release" in this case mean they are going to push the button to allow
users to download it from the app store tonight? Or have they just submitted
it and they are awaiting approval?

~~~
barredo
When you submit an app to the appstore you have two options: release it as
soon as Apple approves it or release it on a date you set (assuming Apple
approved it before). It's very convenient for scheduling app releases on
certain launch dates obviously

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packetslave
The app appears to now be available on US iTunes:
<https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-maps/id585027354>

~~~
hnriot
I get the usual error about the app is no longer available :( I really hope
apple sort out their store problems soon.

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redact207
Have iOS6 users been waiting this long to get GMaps back?? Given the blowout,
why on earth didn't Apple give special approval to GMaps and push the existing
version back into the App Store?

~~~
ghshephard
The IOS6 Map is actually significantly better than the IOS5 maps (Vector,
Voice Turn by Turn, Offline Access, Fast) - And, for popular urban locations
in the United States - it's a significant improvement.

The people who want in-situ transit directions, want Google's much superior
search experience, and those who got screwed over by Apple not covering their
geographic area particularly well - will be happy about this upgrade though.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"And, for popular urban locations in the United States - it's a significant
> improvement."_

Disagreed completely. Pretty much the only people who have had a net positive
from iOS6 Maps are the people who drive, and thus are able to take advantage
of turn-by-turn.

Here in NYC iOS6 Maps is nearly _completely_ useless. Searching for locations
by address frequently takes you _hundreds of miles away_ \- "24 Orchard" takes
you to another state, for example, even if you are standing less than half a
mile from the address. Searching for places by name has a worse than 50/50
chance of finding it, and frequently completely unrelated results come up
instead. Even when Apple can get the addresses of places correct, it
frequently has trouble getting them in the correct _locations_ \- I've seen
many instances of correct addresses dropping the pin in wrong locations -
usually a block or two away.

The disaster of iOS6 Maps goes well beyond the loss of transit directions -
the data and search components are atrocious.

The problem with bad mapping is that it has a thresholding effect. The utility
of your mapping service does not scale linearly with the quality of your data
- once your data is wrong above a certain threshold of all usage, people stop
trusting your maps _entirely_. I do not trust iOS6 Maps because I have no way
of knowing if it got anything right, and its failure rate is high enough that
I have to second guess everything it tells me. Which is to say, it has become
useless.

iOS6 Maps is a disaster for major urban locations in the United States. I for
one am waiting for the Google Maps app to drop like a kid on Christmas eve.

~~~
ghshephard
That's very interesting (and useful) information. It sounds like it's not
"Popular Urban Locations" but instead, a "subset of popular urban location" -
Perhaps I guess I need to be very specific and say in the Bay Area
(Everywhere, all the way down to Gilroy).

Your experience, though, explains why Tim Cook felt he needed to apologize.

Locally (Redwood City, Foster City, Mountain View) I prefer to use the IOS 6
Mapping application on my iPhone 5, than, rather than, side-by-side, the IOS 5
Mapping application on an iPhone 4S. Forgetting about Turn-by-Turn (which is
the obvious and clear advantage of IOS 6 Mapping) - the super twitchy-fast
vector Maps in IOS 6 Maps, not to mention their offline presence made all the
difference. Particularly if you get into a sketchy cell area, where the old
IOS 5 maps was basically "No Maps" - compared to the IOS 6 Maps which are "No
Internet connection required, here are your maps."

While in Redwood City, I send all sorts of queries out to Siri like
"Directions to Waterfront Pizza" (It picks the right one up in Foster City),
and "Directions to 3463 Page Street" (It's intelligent enough to use the Page
Street in Redwood City) - I use maps a lot, and haven't seen any regression
beyond what I would see in google maps. IOS 6 maps is as close to flawless as
a generic mapping application needs to be _for my use in the peninsula area_.

I wonder if Apple did something remarkably stupid, and only optimized the Bay
Area? If so, then they deserve all the bad press they've received over their
mapping application.

It might be interesting to have some third-party do a "Here are 1000 typical
queries in 100 typical urban locations" and come back with a scorecard. Given
that Apple is pulling a lot of data from TomTom for IOS 6 maps, I would be
surprise to see their results much poorer than what TomTom would do give
directly.

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HaloZero
I wonder how many developers will do that block of code that opens web links
in Chrome if its available on your phone.

~~~
joshschreuder
Do you mean like a gmaps:// type URL protocol? I guess it depends on how many
apps bump out to Maps anyway, I haven't seen any personally.

Normally maps are integrated into the app (which means at this point
supporting IOS6 means integrating Apple Maps)

~~~
packetslave
Maps SDK was released as well:
[http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-new-way-
to...](http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-new-way-to-add-
google-maps-to-your.html)

~~~
joshschreuder
Ah cool, I figured this would be coming with the new app.

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yoda_sl
Now that it s out,it will be interesting to have some side to side comparison
of data accuracy and additionally on Data usage between the 2 apps. The
previous iOS 5 apps was using image tiling but these new app seems to use the
vector based one, so in a way similar to what Apple maps s doing.

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mrb
Yeah suure, "Google to release Maps tonight". More like: "Apple to approve
Maps tonight".

Google submitted Maps to Apple months ago (although Eric Schmidt remained
voluntarily ambiguous and avoided to say it explicitly):
[http://9to5mac.com/2012/09/25/eric-schmidt-on-google-maps-
on...](http://9to5mac.com/2012/09/25/eric-schmidt-on-google-maps-on-ios-we-
think-it-would-have-been-better-if-they-had-kept-ours-but-what-do-i-know/)
After firing the iOS Maps manager (Rich Williamson), Apple decided to take the
only sensible approach of finally pushing a button to let Google Maps in the
app store, as a short-term stop-gap solution to end their endusers'
frustration.

~~~
tedunangst
More like "Clock to tick forward to Google decided date to release already
Apple approved Maps".

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Sym3tri
<https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-maps/id585027354?mt=8>

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akgerber
Still no bike maps on iPhone.

