
A Year of Google and Apple Maps - almostdigital
https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-apple-maps
======
gumby
This is the most significant fact:

> Over the course of a year, Google quietly turned its map inside-out –
> transforming it from a road map into a place map.

I've long been amazed how we somehow transitioned during the early 20th
century from a mental model of roads and paths running through locations to
places (house lots, etc) being the spaces between the roads. It's a natural
thing to happen, but one of those invisible flips that happens on a timescale
longer than a human lifetime.

But this anticipates the opposite: if you can stop worrying about _how_ to get
somewhere (because you don't have to drive or plan much -- self-driving or
Lyft-style services can take care of the route planning) you can focus on the
destination.

We see this phenomenon in subway maps which are famously schematic and not
geographical.

(BTW the transformation is visible in literature, which is how I noticed it.
The sense of geography in, say, Jane Austin is completely alien to today).

~~~
olegkikin
It's interesting that in Manhattan they removed "Greenwich Village", but added
"230 Fifth Rooftop Bar" and "Vinegar Hill". That makes no sense to me.

[https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54ff63f0e4b0bafce6932...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54ff63f0e4b0bafce6932642/t/59288282ff7c50117bc25807/1495827086559/?format=750w)

Even according to Google Trends "Greenwich village" is 6.5 times more popular
than "Vinegar Hill", let alone some rooftop bar.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Greenwich%20Villa...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Greenwich%20Village,vinegar%20hill)

~~~
twoodfin
Aren't the places Google Maps chooses to highlight a function of your account
history? Certainly seems that way to me.

Anyway, Greenwich Village still shows up as a neighborhood label at a range of
zoom levels, just not the particular scale for this image.

~~~
ProAm
> Aren't the places Google Maps chooses to highlight a function of your
> account history?

Google has become good at telling you what you used to know versus what you
want to discover

~~~
kevincox
I disagree. Places that I have visited serve as excellent landmarks. I
wouldn't want them to be the only thing on the map but having them dusted
around makes it very easy for me to know where new places are.

------
serhei
It's also interesting to see how maps evolve (or fail to evolve) for places
that are not San Francisco.

At the moment, Apple Maps seems to have a more thought-through design for
public transit than Google Maps. Which is to say, transit view in Apple Maps
is either visually clean and uncluttered, or completely nonexistent, depending
on whether they got around to adding your city. Clearly a lot of by-hand
design work goes into it, which isn't a very scalable approach.

On the other hand, transit data in Google sometimes appears to have been
munged with no human intervention and never received even a cursory check by a
graphic designer. For example, turning on Transit view in downtown Toronto
will show a mess of ungodly rainbow spaghetti which is meant to represent the
streetcar system. There are lines on non-revenue tracks where no streetcars
actually run, lines on streets that don't have streetcar tracks, random
artefact lines that appear and then vanish two blocks later, and lines drawn
diagonally through the middle of High Park where there is no street at all.
Somehow, the data behind this spaghetti is diligently updated year-after-year
(e.g. the new Cherry streetcar was added in 2016) without anyone involved in
the process noticing that the results are hideously garbled.

It also took them about a decade to realize that the SkyTrain in Vancouver is
a rapid transit system.

~~~
zem
transit (the company) has some really nice blog posts about the difficulty of
making transit maps

[https://medium.com/transit-app/transit-maps-apple-vs-
google-...](https://medium.com/transit-app/transit-maps-apple-vs-google-vs-us-
cb3d7cd2c362)

[https://medium.com/transit-app/how-we-built-the-worlds-
prett...](https://medium.com/transit-app/how-we-built-the-worlds-prettiest-
auto-generated-transit-maps-12d0c6fa502f)

~~~
serhei
I really like the approach described in these links. Targeted algorithms solve
specific problems (e.g. ILP to decide ordering of adjacent lines) instead of
someone trying to put together a Grand Unified Machine Learning Algorithm that
ends up having to be fudged manually after it gets 99 cases right and makes an
egregious mistake in the 100th one.

The more general problem Transit seems to be trying to solve (that no one else
is) is having a map that can be kept up-to-date with transit alerts and
diversions with minimal hassle. For example, it looks like their launch-time
picture of Toronto's streetcars (in the first link) was generated when there
was trackwork at the College and Bathurst intersection and the corresponding
streetcar lines were being diverted around it.

The second link explains rather well the reasons behind some of the problems
evident in Google's Toronto map. For example, the unsnapping issue for
adjacent lines occurs a lot because streetcar lines are heavily interlined.

~~~
zem
they really are a great company. when there was an outage in san francisco's
schedule reporting system, they had users tag themselves as being on specific
buses, and tried to synthesise their own real-time schedule from that.

------
BatFastard
One thing I think Google has going for is it "Guides" program. Where user get
"points" for correcting mistakes, adding new places, and publishing pictures.
I have been in it for a few months and it feels good to contribute.

~~~
avar
I was uploading images to Google Maps before that anyway, and if I recall
signed up for it, it's just a point meter.

Google then sends you a summary of how your contributions were doing. Recently
they send me some E-Mail to the effect of "Awesome! Your image on <business
name> has been viewed 100 thousand times!" or something like that.

It entirely turned me off the whole thing and I haven't contributed since. I
thought "why am I contributing to this ad-powered product that they're
monetizing for millions, for free?".

It's kind of hilarious really. If you look at their landing page the benefits
you can gain include things like "...and you can also moderate our forums, for
us, for free!":
[https://www.google.com/local/guides/benefits/](https://www.google.com/local/guides/benefits/)

Yay!

~~~
gniv
> I thought "why am I contributing to this ad-powered product that they're
> monetizing for millions, for free?".

Can you show me a single ad on Google Maps?

~~~
Jackim
[https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3246303?hl=en](https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3246303?hl=en)

------
maheart
I was curious to see how well OpenStreetMap (OSM) had these locations mapped:
[http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/37.77620/-122.42455](http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/37.77620/-122.42455)

~~~
Symbiote
With this site, you can compare up to 8 maps at once:

[https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/?lon=-122.424438&lat=37.776229&zoom...](https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/?lon=-122.424438&lat=37.776229&zoom=18&num=8&mt0=mapnik&mt1=google-
map&mt2=hike_bike&mt3=bbbike-bbbike&mt4=tomtom-basic-main&mt5=mapquest-
map&mt6=bing-map&mt7=nokia-public_transit)

~~~
stinos
Wow, thanks for posting that, it is really nifty. And makes it much easier to
confirm what I already figured for a while: OSM being open really helps in
adding a ton of interesting details which matter to me, whereas the bigger map
players are overwhelmingly undetailed in areas which aren't considered
important enough (at leat I assume that is the reason). Like the small village
where I live: OSM has even the smallest footpaths, even going so far as
including an official one which doesn't really exist because it is currently
part of privatly owned land, it is apty labelled 'old footpath xx' so one can
see the new route is now 'footpath xx'.

~~~
photojosh
This is the sort of thing I do in my local area; update OSM with anything I
notice that's missing and seems like it belongs.

The bulk of my updates are local trails through the bush from when I go
exploring, based on my GPS tracks. But I've also been adding pedestrian paths
between streets, new roads from residential developments, and so on.

I'm guessing it just takes a few of this kind of person to keep OSM up-to-
date. It's a shame it's not more widely used directly by the general public
with some way of flagging errors.

------
puzzle
Additional data point about the missing "coastline dropshadows", on top of the
general "bleaching" trend: that kind of effect is also not free to implement
in WebGL or in mobile apps. Plus the folks that were involved in designing it
have since left.

~~~
comex
How so? Drawing a drop shadow is not _free_ , but on a GPU it should be rather
cheap. It's just a blur of an all-black version of the object; not only are
blurs fully parallel, they're separable (into successive operations blurring
along the X and Y axes), reducing the number of input pixels that have to be
considered for each output pixel. For a shadow in particular you don't need a
very high-quality blur, you can act on single-channel greyscale images (less
bandwidth), and the usual depth testing should skip running the pixel shader
on pixels covered by the shape itself. And of course GPUs are only getting
faster, not slower.

But the wording of your post suggests your info comes from the source, so
maybe I'm missing something.

~~~
puzzle
It's not expensive, but it all adds up. I put the words in quotes because it's
not actually what is commonly known as a drop shadow
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_shadow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_shadow)).
It's more like a silhouette shader. This picture shows the effect in full
glory:

[https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-C3L7c1Y1ck4/UZOk1ldMiBI/AAAAAAAAC...](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-C3L7c1Y1ck4/UZOk1ldMiBI/AAAAAAAACs4/KtymYa4tM78/s1600/Screenshot+2013-05-15+at+12.38.58+AM.jpg)

I can't remember if the highlighted water region was in a fixed location or if
it followed the sunlight. (You definitely see building shadows change
direction according to the time of the day in 2D WebGL mode, e.g. near the
Eiffel tower. This is what I mean when I say that it all adds up, especially
with WebGL 1.0 and an underpowered GPU like the original Chromebook Pixel's
Intel HD4000.)

~~~
Theodores
Do people actually use the Chromebook Pixel Mark 1 in the Googleplex and is 3D
performance on maps a problem for them?

A while ago I took off the 'designer' font choices from a website (spider grey
text on grey background, kerning mangled) with some local CSS. Everyone
prefered the simple legibility to what was on my screen so we set the website
to be like mine, legible.

I wonder if some people on the Google Maps team had a similar internal hack to
optimise their workflow - turning off graphics cruft - get back to legibility
- and if someone got this fed back into the actual design, 'as proven by the
team'. I prefer this evolution of design, from people who have to get the data
right in the first case and how they 'optimise' the presentation of that
information for themselves.

------
JumpCrisscross
> _This all seems to suggest that Google’s location data is more precise than
> Apple’s. (Or that Apple’s geocoder is buggy.) And perhaps here we’re seeing
> the fruits of Google’s decade-long Street View project._

How can Apple catch up? Is there an obvious acquisition?

~~~
remir
Waze was the obvious acquisition, because the Map editor is well done and
accessible on the web, the community is very active and Apple even used their
data, but Google was smarter and acquired them.

Apple Maps is limited to Macs and iDevices, while Google Maps is accessible
essentially everywhere (web and Search page and Android/iOS). Because of this,
it's easier for the masses to update information on Google Maps than Apple
Maps.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Though I'd give anything to be able to use Google Maps with CarPlay.

------
sixothree
My biggest problem with google maps is that it doesn't respect the font size
settings of my device. A four point font is not ideal for my eyes in the best
of conditions, much less when travelling and navigating.

~~~
on_and_off
I know it is useless to you if you are stuck on an old OS version but IMO
Nougat did this right :

\- changing the font size is a mess .. I work on UI on a large Android app and
it is not trivial to make a design adapt to very large font sizes without
sacrificing performances. Most apps don't bother though .. so you end up with
mangled text fields.

-Nougat still support font size changes but has also added what I think is a better implementation : variable density. The OS can 'lie' to the framework and the running apps and declare a pixel density different than its natural one.

That way the whole interface gets scaled (since interfaces are designed in
density independent pixels).

Works like a charm and won't have any UI glitch because of it.

------
nicoboo
Justin O'Beirne's articles are extremely detailed as always. It's definitely a
must-see for mappers whatever the company or products you're working with.

~~~
puzzle
He seems to be gently trolling his former employer, too.

~~~
nicoboo
But he is consistent since 2010 in his point of view and analysis process.
Getting even more precise, so or course it might have trolled a little bit but
his arguments make a truly interesting whole.

------
microcolonel
I can't for the life of me understand why Apple pays TomTom for maps of places
where OpenStreetMap is unequivocally more accurate. OpenStreetMap also has the
correct layout of the footpaths at the north and south of the park, points of
interest for _every bench_ and a marked area in the location and correct shape
of the playground, making the data (at least assuming Google renders their
best data) considerably higher quality. I think this says a lot, especially
considering the default leg-up that Google has here. They have images of the
contours of every one of those paths, they have GPS traces, they have
photogrammetry-quality photography and location, they have lots of people
writing photogrammetry software; and yet for some reason they still don't
appear to fuse the streetview, aerial, and satellite imagery, or seem to do
feature detection for points of interest.

The big problem which seems to make it not worth expanding your dataset for
graphical maps, is that it is quite difficult to display a lot of data, and
still be easier to read than an aerial photograph.

~~~
tonfa
> I can't for the life of me understand why Apple pays TomTom for maps of
> places where OpenStreetMap is unequivocally more accurate.

I suppose they can't easily, since the OSM license change.

My understanding is they'd have to open a lot of the geo data that they
integrate together into their maps (POI, public transit, etc.), which might
not be feasible as I suspect most of what they integrate is commercial and not
owned by them.

(someone could check, but while Apple Maps had been using OSM e.g. for
Pakistan, did they ever switch to post-relicensing data anywhere, or do they
just keep using 2012 data?)

~~~
microcolonel
I mean, if OSM is more accurate anyway, then they might as well have a staff
to generate their own data. There's no point in being greedy with their POI
annotations if the end result is not sufficiently detailed to be useful
anyway.

~~~
tonfa
It's often easier to acquire it at least partially, it's not necessarily being
greedy as much as not owning the 3rd party data in the first place (but having
a license to it).

OSM is more of an all or nothing, everything has to be shared back, so it's
hard to be pragmatic and mix different sources some open and some proprietary.

(and not every company wants to run a full fledged geo operation, and those
can do it at scale will often end up keeping their data proprietary)

~~~
maxerickson
Mixing is hard, using different sources for different sorts of data is likely
fine.

[http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Licence_and_Legal...](http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Licence_and_Legal_FAQ#What_exactly_do_I_need_to_share.3F)

 _You can however, put separate and distinct data layers on top of your map,
such as icons showing specialists points of interest, routes, track logs,
shaded areas, contours and the like, then Share-Alike does not apply to these
elements as long as they do not interact with the map underneath._

------
bitmapbrother
I was surprised by how out of date Apple maps were. I guess TomTom doesn't
update their data that much.

~~~
joshvm
In the UK Apple maps is superior in one important way: it knows about road
closures. Google maps here still doesn't seem to take into account planned
closures, which are published by the council, so often it'll direct you right
into a roadblock.

(Reading the article, Apple sources data from TomTom, which probably explains
why they have good up-to-date satnav information.)

------
mcphage
The thing I still don't get is, why don't any of these map services indicate
traffic lights? When navigating to an unfamiliar place, counting the lights,
or looking for the next traffic light, is much easier than using distance or
street names.

~~~
lucb1e
OpenStreetMap has this. I don't see a use for it, but if someone sees a use
for it, they're free to add it to the dataset. Seems you and others find it
useful, and it's in there :)

~~~
maxerickson
You wouldn't be able to rely on "turn right and go through 2 stop lights" type
directions derived from OpenStreetMap, traffic lights aren't mapped all that
consistently.

~~~
mcphage
Ah, bummer :-(

~~~
maxerickson
It isn't super complicated data to capture, I think a single person could fill
in a small to medium sized town in an easy weekend.

There's an issue where intersections aren't really mapped in OSM (at least in
terms of priority, turn restrictions are increasingly captured), the pieces
are all well modeled but there isn't much information about how they fit
together.

------
Steko
The At a Distance blog has extensively covered Apple Maps' deficiencies (and
progress) in Japan where Yahoo maps is the best option.

[https://atadistance.net](https://atadistance.net)

~~~
nihonde
It may seem strange but Yahoo is indeed the best maps app in Japan. Yahoo
(Japan) also makes the best transit app here.

People give Google Maps a lot of credit but I find it really hard to use as a
means for keeping track of places I like, or for discovering new places. For
example, if I want to label a custom pin, I have to grant Google some sweeping
permissions to use my web and mobile activity data. I couldn't grant that
permission if I wanted to, as it's turned off somewhere in the bowels of my G
Suite domain management settings.

------
twhb
It can't be coincidence that Google's increased focus on areas and places
brings it closer to Apple Maps. It's easy to miss because of Apple's poorer
data, but I think their app legitimately bested Google in some areas (heh),
and this is Google absorbing those characteristics.

------
Gustomaximus
Id love to see them compare Here maps. I use Here for all my driving. Its much
better interface, directions timing and has some unique features.Also I like
the idea of supporting an independent player. While Google Maps is better when
looking for businesses like a restaurant etc.

~~~
bitmapbrother
The majority of Here maps is owned by the trio of Dieselgate companies
Volkswagen, BMW, and Daimler. I would hardly call them an independant player.
I've also tried Here maps and about the only good thing about it was the
ability to download maps and speed limit warnings. Everything else was
mediocre and outdated.

~~~
Gustomaximus
Speed limit warning must have saved me a few tickets! I find its a better
driving platform as its simpler. You can more easily read it at ta glance,
whereas Google maps keeps getting worse on this front as they keep adding to
it. Also their direction timing seems better. I think its a tad earlier and
doesn't tend to get caught in loops where it tells you the same or irrelevant
information again and again.

------
peterburkimsher
How can I configure OpenStreetMap to use the old Google Maps colours with an
emphasis on roads?

I'm currently using some offline cached maps tiles downloaded with MOBAC, and
waiting for Google to change their colours back again. Now I realise that it's
a place map, and places generate advertising revenue, I think that Google is
unlikely to fix that.

Another problem that happened recently in Taiwan was when Google removed
pinyin (latin letters) from the street names, leaving only Chinese characters.
Foreigners living here couldn't find their way around. I threw together a
quick alternative to GMaps, and told people about it - until Google put the
pinyin back about a week later.

~~~
microcolonel
There is Mapbox, they are a hosted provider which has a pretty straightforward
tool for styling the map. I think they also have a starting style which is
pretty similar to older Google Maps. I think they also have some level of
customization for labels, and if you have a big need to have Pīnyīn I'm sure
that something could be done for that.

------
GabeN
It seems that with the increasing attention given to 'places' and less
emphasis on the actual roads we are looking at Google getting Maps ready for
the roll-out of self driving cars where the focus is on the destination rather
than the journey.

~~~
abrowne
I'm pretty map-aware and a bit of a pre-planner, but even my usual usage is to
choose a destination and have Google give me directions. (Then maybe I'll
tweak it or whatever.) Same with my 65-year-old dad who still buys a folding
paper street map for each new city he visits. Does anyone still visually plan
a route on Google Maps by just looking at the road markings?

~~~
samastur
No, because it is a pain to do, not because I would not want to. Rarely
because it wants me to take a closed road. More often because I would like to
travel through some part of a land and am not interested in the most efficient
way of reaching my final destination.

------
krzyk
It's a pitty he doesn't compare it to OpenStreetMap also.

------
lucb1e
I'm a little disappointed that the "Cartography Comparison" only looks at two
commercial maps. Not even all commercial maps, let alone including
OpenStreetMap. A big post detailing the minute differences between two of the
big ones are not that interesting...

------
nelsonfv
Well, here in Venezuela Apple Maps is practically useless. Traffic data just
arrived about a year ago to Google Maps and it's been a fantastic tool to get
on time to most places. Apple Maps doesn't even give directions.

------
627467
My main complaint is the decrease is display priority of personal labels
except for the stars.

Back in the day before labels I would star places I needed to "bookmark"
regardless of importance in time and how ephemeral that mark was. Then when
labels appeared I thought that was ideal to mark places which are always
important (because I can personalize the label) as opposed to a generic star
which most likely meant a temporary bookmark.

It seems that with this new Google maps, the stars always get display priority
(it's shown even at smallest zoom level) whereas labels only appear at a
algorithmically defined location (which seems arbitrary).

All this time wasted in personalizing my map.

------
johnsmith21006
Google maps has the lane to use and Apple maps does not and i have a terrible
sense of direction so Google maps is really my only viable choice.

------
Doctor_Fegg
> And as of 2014, Google had already driven 99% of U.S. public roads

Nope. Try dragging Pegman over anywhere in the rural Midwest and see what you
get. 99% of US _paved_ roads, perhaps.

~~~
theDoug
Mapping a road and photographing it for StreetView are also not the same
thing.

~~~
CamperBob2
Why not? If they're "driving" the roads (their term), they're presumably
photographing them. You don't need to drive the road just to map it.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Because the Street View rig is expensive to manufacture; ordinary "driving the
roads" can be done with normal vehicles. (Heck, you could even source data
from usual drivers, if you owned e.g. Waze)

------
curyous
Great in-depth analysis that goes beyond what's obvious on the surface.

------
swrobel
This guy is a Real American Hero

------
51Cards
In response to the very last lines of the article:

"Three different looks? What’s going on with Google Maps’ design?"

A/B testing perhaps?

~~~
jsnell
I think you mistook the section separator for the end of the article; that
sentence isn't even halfway through it :) The rest of the article tries to
answer exactly this question, and has a more interesting hypothesis than A/B
testing.

