
Apple’s New Map, Expansion #7: Final Parts of the Continental U.S. - Amorymeltzer
https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps-continental-united-states
======
celeritascelery
There was off ramp that changed 4 years ago near where I live. Google maps was
correct, but Apple always would have you take the wrong exit and you had to
loop back. With the most recent update this is finally fixed. However most
people still saying that Apple Maps in unreliable. Having big issues like that
for years can really damage people’s perception of your product long after it
has been changed.

~~~
dmd
And yet it's still wrong often enough to be useless. I'm in near-Boston
suburbs (Arlington), and every so often I give Apple Maps a try, and
__literally every single time I do __it 's just awful. I just asked it for
directions from my work to my house, for example, and it routed me on a
limited-access, no motor vehicle bicycle path.

~~~
azinman2
Is that true now with the new data?

~~~
dmd
True as of just now, so yes.

~~~
azinman2
That’s not good!

I’d highly encourage you to report this issue. Can’t promise it’ll be looked
at anytime soon, but it’s good to put into the queue:

[https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/report-errors-in-apple-
maps...](https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/report-errors-in-apple-maps/)

~~~
mackey
I posted this on another comment but I curious if you have any advice.

I work in downtown Boston and my building's address isn't in Apple Maps. It
"corrects" it to some place in JP, which is a residential address. There are
several restaurants and and companies in this building, all marked as being in
JP. I have submitted a lot of map corrections but all that does is move the
location of the business on the map to the right place even though it still
has the wrong address listed. That means if you actually try to navigate to
them, it brings you to the wrong place. It also means no location based
triggers work for things like Homekit and/or reminders. There are hundreds of
people in this building, right in downtown. How do I get it to understand this
address?

~~~
dmd
Yup. I live in Arlingon. I put in 123 mystreet street, arlington, ma ... and
it navigates to 123 mystreet ROAD, belmont, ma.

My street has existed for 150 years.

------
mataug
I've recently switched to using apple maps exclusively as much as possible,
and TBH its gotten quite comparable to Google maps. There are still remote
places (e.g an address in a small town) which apple maps struggles to find,
but for the most part within cities I find myself reaching more often for
apple maps.

I'm also one of those people who struggles to translate navigation
instructions on a map to real world turns. So features such as highlighting
and Stop signs & Traffic signals go a long way in helping me navigate safely.

~~~
ajpkco
Apple Maps displaying stop signs and traffic lights is a killer feature for
me. Made me switch from Gmaps.

------
supernova87a
How does he get those cutout comparison tiles exactly identical in
perspective, position, and zoom level? Does he have some call that allows
doing that?

~~~
xenospn
Was wondering that myself. Presumably when you update your maps app or when
the server updated, you have no more access to the old maps. Unless he took a
whole lot of screenshots in preparation?

~~~
et-al
The URL to an Apple Maps tile includes a version number and numerous style
options. It's possible the author knows about historical tile versions and
updates the URL to fetch older versions, or has been archiving Apple's tiles
periodically _.

    
    
      https://cdn4.apple-mapkit.com/md/v1/vtile?x=1310&y=3166&z=13&scale=2&style=1&v=2002014&type=poi&lang=en&tint=light&emphasis=standard
    

Grabbed the tile from Apple's page here:
[https://developer.apple.com/maps/web/](https://developer.apple.com/maps/web/)

The author also has their email address listed on their site if we'd like a
definite answer.

\- - -

_Edit: Looks like MapKit provides an easy way to take snapshots:
[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/snapshots](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/snapshots)

~~~
xenospn
I completely forgot about Mapkit JS! I wonder how feature complete it is
compared to Leaflet.

------
hprotagonist
Perhaps soon we'll get cycling directions.

------
jccalhoun
There is still too much use of green. At least for me, I think green = park. I
live near the end of a bypass and on apple maps it looks like a big park. I
don't think I would want to go have a picnic on the slope of an off-ramp.

------
masked_titan
Can someone tell me where did Apple get all this new data from? Was it taken
from OSM, bought from Here Maps or some other provider or just built on their
own from sattelites and on the ground surveys?

~~~
GeekyBear
Previously they licensed TomTom's data and tried to fill in gaps with data
from OpenStreetMap and others.

Now they have decided to build their own data set from scratch.

>So a new effort was created to begin generating its own base maps, the very
lowest building block of any really good mapping system. After that, Apple
would begin layering on living location data, high-resolution satellite
imagery and brand new intensely high-resolution image data gathered from its
ground cars until it had what it felt was a “best in class” mapping product.

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-
maps-f...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-from-
the-ground-up/)

That TechCrunch article has a good overview of their old and new mapping
systems.

~~~
maxerickson
I don't have any insight into how they are choosing, but they are investing in
improving OpenStreetMap in many places:

[https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues](https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues)

~~~
GeekyBear
Here, Bing, and Apple have all pitched in to help OpenStreetMaps improve their
processes and their dataset.

~~~
maxerickson
What's Here done?

Microsoft has long made Bing imagery available for tracing, it's only recently
that they have done much with data.

None of the companies have really touched "processes", because OpenStreetMap
doesn't really have any formal processes.

------
dang
Recent and related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193657)

------
peburrows
I appreciate the work this author does to compile these posts, but man, every
time I visit his site, I get frustrated that there’s no way to stop the map
animations to inspect in detail what has actually changed. Invariably, I get
frustrated by the constant flashing back and forth and just close the tab
without getting the information I’d actually like to get.

------
nicoboo
Always a wonderful work by Justin.

------
ycombonator
Apple Maps is no where near google maps. It took me to someone’s driveway as
“an entrance to” an elementary school, when in reality the school was behind
their backyard with no direct access. They haven’t fixed one thing I
painstakingly reported over the years. I wanted Apple Maps to succeed but from
what I gather they are too disorganized to compete with Google Maps.

------
atdt
How are they generating the 3D models of various landmark buildings? It's hard
to believe that they were generated from photos, since the lines look so
clean. But there are too many of them to do by hand, no?

~~~
vineyardmike
The author of this post made other posts, including one discussing the
building generation:

[https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-
maps](https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps)

It appears to be a combination of algorithmic work from satellites with manual
generation mixed in.

