
DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps - doener
https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-apple-mapkit-js-update/
======
burlesona
This is cool to see, and I think should be a virtuous cycle. As I understand
it, maps is the kind of thing where more usage really helps make the map
better, and while DDG doesn’t bring the scale of being the iphone’s default
map, it should be adding a non-trivial amount of traffic.

I’ve used Apple Maps as my primary map since it came out, and I’ve only gotten
a wrong location one time in literally thousands of searches, and that was
years ago. It wasn’t really ready when it launched, but it has gotten
consistently better over time. The UX is great, in many cases the satellite
imagery is more up-to-date compared to Google, and it doesn’t maul my battery
to use. Not saying it’s clearly better than Google, because it isn’t, but for
my usage it’s more than “good enough,” and I love to see Apple’s privacy
respecting products compete effectively with big G.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Not saying it’s clearly better than Google_

If privacy is worth something to you, it’s clearly better than Google.

I, too, use Apple as my primary map. In many cases, Apple Maps is better
Google. The ones in which it’s behind are more than made up for by Apple’s
values.

~~~
inferiorhuman
_If privacy is worth something to you, it’s clearly better than Google._

Is it? Has everyone forgotten the Yelp tracking beacon? Good thing Apple
relies on Yelp for business info and has pretty deep Yelp integration with the
mobile app.

~~~
jeromegv
Apple have shown times and times again that they wouldn't let 3rd party do
shady things into their own Maps app, that's the whole reason they got rid of
Google Maps. That's a baseless accusation.

~~~
metildaa
Apple has taken good stances on most privacy issues, but Apple Maps is poorly
run.

The main failure is not having something akin to a Google Scout, whereby iOS
users could submit info about businesses and streets that lack data. Apple
instead hires a ton of contractors in Austin (and now India) to manually trace
roads and guess business hours based on anonymized GPS traces.

Apple lacks the scale of Google's army of unpaid Google Scouts (though they
could easily fix this) and is wasting time on minutia rather than task their
staff/contractors with sourcing & importing higher quality data regularly. One
example would be importing county shapefiles, Apple could easily vault ahead
of Google Maps if they diffed their map against each of the thousands of
county maps in the USA, and they would be the only one regularly doing this
(OSM does this occasionally, but not often).

They could also scrape business data from each state and use that to produce
more accurate & detailed business listings than Google, among many other low
hanging fruit.

~~~
dangus
This is not 100% true, if you go to an existing business listing and scroll to
the bottom there's a "report an issue" option. Apple has fixed my reported
issues within a few days in the past.

In another sense I'm not sure why it should matter to the end user how many
interns Apple hires to do things behind the scenes. I'm imagining that Apple
is well aware of these shortcomings. Not only that I wonder if operational
information observations like this quickly become outdated. i.e. it's all
manual and terrible until somebody gets around to automating it.

~~~
metildaa
These user reports take weeks to months to get triaged, making many rather
useless.

~~~
Spooky23
They all have that problem.

My son's school is in a kafka-ish situation with Google where their listing is
wrong and cannot be changed. People cannot write reviews, and data doesn't get
updated.

98/100 times, updates to Apple or Google mapping products are done in hours or
days. The 2/100, forget it.

~~~
metildaa
Apple Maps has a deep queue for reports about map inaccuracies, your minimum
wait time is a few days 98 times out of 100. This is fixable, but it requires
even more staffing than Apple already has working on Apple Maps (which is most
of the people they employ in Austin and India).

------
cletus
I think of Apple Maps the same way I think of North Korea's missile program: I
know it exists and it has continent-level accuracy.

~~~
rootusrootus
I use it all the time. In Portland it is as good as GMaps is at navigating
fastest route during heavy traffic. Which is to say, not perfect, but
adequate. It has yet to take me to the wrong location.

~~~
inferiorhuman
Apple Maps is pretty awful in the Bay Area. My favorite recently was it's
insistence that I make a left turn off of Van Ness. Left turns have largely
been banned from Van Ness starting with the huge construction project, but the
left turn Apple Maps was also demanding was also across a double yellow line
where a left turn would've been illegal regardless of construction.

Yesterday I was trying to remember if this deli was on Howard or Folsom (and I
forgot the exact name). The search results for 'deli' were basically
everywhere on North America except for where I was (including across town).
Searching for businesses with Apple Maps is nearly impossible, and the
insistence upon installing the Yelp app to get more info is just infuriating.

Edit: Oh yeah and it can't find Grainger in Millbrae to save its life. Shit
happens and business info is one of the hardest parts about mapping.
Unfortunately Apple makes it damn near impossible to report problems to a real
human.

Edit edit: My all time favorite though was asking Siri for directions to some
club that I usually take BART to. I kept getting directions to a not that
nearby and not that similarly named bail bondsman.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
What is "Grainger in Millbrae?" Do you mean Grainger Industrial Supply in
Burlingame? Because if you do, that's why it can't find them in Millbrae. :)

This is all anecdotal, which is kind of the issue, isn't it? I'm in the Bay
Area, too, and I very rarely have any problems with Apple Maps. It isn't
perfect, but it's absolutely not "pretty awful." I have no significant
problems finding businesses with Apple Maps; I literally just typed "deli" and
the first search suggestion that came up was "Delis - search nearby," and it,
well, found delis nearby.

Problems due to long-term construction seem to be a weakness for it, but I've
run into those issues with Google and Waze, too.

~~~
inferiorhuman
Sorry, yes, Burlingame. All the teeny peninsula towns tend to blend together
to me, and Grainger shuttered its SF outpost. Apple Maps happily took me to
the street behind the store where there is/was no entrance.

Even when I know the name I often have problems finding something in Apple
Maps. Up in Marin, searching for "Apple Store" pulled up listings for the
Apple Stores in the East Bay (the one in Corte Madera was significantly
lower).

Or, if I'm looking for the specific address for the junk yard... for a while
it would sort the results in seemingly random order. Right now it seems to at
least be sorting by distance, but I think it default to heavily weighting
towards what you were last looking at, which almost makes sense (but this
seems to persist even if you move someplace else lending an utterly
unpredictable feel to the results). This wouldn't be a huge problem but the
distance is only shown for the top two results, and the city name is often
truncated so chains will often be hard to distinguish from one another. Even
better if I scroll up too far it backs out of the search itself and clears the
search bar.

Edit: Oh yeah, and the deli was actually called a market (but I had also
searched for market and only gotten results for Market Street).

------
bad_user
I live in Romania.

It depends on the country, but for search what really matters are the points
of interest and Apple Maps in my country doesn't have any, whereas OSM and
Google Maps are competing head to head.

Even for driving, the OSM apps available, while lower quality, are more
reliable when I travel to Bulgaria for example. The penetration of Google Maps
in Eastern Europe isn't great and Apple Maps isn't worth bothering with.

Anyway, I wonder why DuckDuckGo is choosing Apple Maps. It makes no sense IMO
from a user experience perspective.

Remember that if you're in California or New York, those are the primary
markets targeted by all tech companies, so your experience with Apple Maps is
not representative of the rest of the world.

In my travels OSM fares quite well in terms of its POS database and is the
only one that can compete with Google Maps in that regard.

~~~
raxxorrax
In Germany I use OSM exclusively for navigating and it is very good. Maybe not
quite on the level of Google maps concerning things like live traffic, but
certainly good enough to reach your goal and then some. Love the project and
would have liked to have DuckDuckGo support it instead of using proprietary
data.

Google Maps has shown what can happen if you use it for anything business
critical.

edit: Sadly OSM doesn't yet have services like forward adress search (might be
too expensive to provide). It would enable many businesses to use it for
adress comparison to clean up their own data for example. I think that could
put OSM on the map so to speak.

~~~
kreetx
Any tips to switching, as in which app etc?

~~~
maskros
Currently my favorite OSM-based map and navigation app on Android is this one:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.axe...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.axet.maps)

Fantastic non-cluttered UI and offline maps that don't eat up my mobile data.

------
baddox
> For example, try a query such as "coffee shops" and zoom in on the map to
> refine your search.

There is exactly one result for "coffee shops" in San Francisco. The tech and
privacy initiatives sound good, but unfortunately the data needs work to pass
basic sanity checks.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coffee+shops&ia=web&iaxm=maps&stri...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coffee+shops&ia=web&iaxm=maps&strict_bbox=1&bbox=37.891217720838085%2C-122.61477652810956%2C37.54794931917816%2C-122.22476187967206)

 _Edit:_

Searching for "coffee shop" (singular) shows many more results. Perhaps the
blog post should use that as its example.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coffee+shop&ia=web&iaxm=maps&stric...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coffee+shop&ia=web&iaxm=maps&strict_bbox=0&bbox=37.891217720838085%2C-122.61477652810956%2C37.54794931917816%2C-122.22476187967206)

~~~
banach
"coffee shop" on the other hand yields 20 results. I agree that some support
for fuzzy search is needed, but there is a reasonable amount of data there.

~~~
asdff
I hate when searches parse like that. Ideally coffee shop, coffee shops,
coffee, cafe, espresso, etc. should all give me the same exact results: 100%
of the stores in the area that sell coffee.

I don't think there's a single piece of mapping software that doesn't suck
hard in some way. It's pretty annoying how google maps shows you x number of
results zoomed out, y zoomed in, and z with the map frame moved half a block
to the left.

Just show me everything. Search the entire city. Flood my map. Let me do the
vetting, that's what I came to maps to do anyway.

~~~
bhandziuk
where the sets of y and z might not even overlap

------
kabacha
I'm still so perplexed why they didn't go with OpenStreetMaps which are not
only floss but also infinitely better. Apple maps are absolutely useless in my
region, while osm has always been at least toretable experience wherever I
went in the world. Actually OSM is often better than google maps - the only
thing it really lacks is better user review ecosystem.

~~~
kkarakk
OSM doesn't have great APIs, you end up having to have GIS experts on your
team in order to use it in your product. source:someone who tried to use OSM
stuff in a IoT fleet tracking system. Even Bing maps is better than OSM

------
WillyF
One thing thing that I love about Apple Maps is that they have the name of
every river, stream, creek, and ditch if you zoom in far enough. I can't find
this information in Google Maps (maybe there's a way to find it, but zooming
in doesn't do it). This was exceptionally helpful on my recent trip to
Corsica, where I was searching for a specific stream with a genetically
significant population of native trout. Apple Maps made finding it a breeze,
and even had the name of all the tributaries that flow into it, which were
essentially just trickles.

I subscribe to OnX Maps for most of my fishing and hunting research in the
United States, but Apple Maps is a pretty great free option.

~~~
dsd
I noticed that too. I like osmand (openstreetmap) for the same reason. It's
like google maps decided to practice more minimalism than apple did.

------
olah_1
Very recently Qwant launched their Maps beta that is based on OpenStreetMaps.
Discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20304720](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20304720)

Sidenote: I use duckduckgo for Safari search. I saw an ad on twitter for
something that I searched in a private window of Safari. Not sure whose fault
that is, but it really disturbed me.

~~~
scrooched_moose
Interesting, but certainly not usable yet.

My "shorthand" address missed my house by about 5 miles, and the precise
mailing address (like I'd use on an envelope) brought up a steakhouse about 8
miles away. My company name dropped me in Saudi Arabia, and the exact address
dropped me in New York (I'm in Minnesota).

It's the same issue I have with Open Street Maps, if you're not in SF/NYC/Chi
they're damn near useless. OSM at least gets me to the correct block, although
it's still off by about 500 feet.

Edit: Oh boy, this is like Cuil again. Grand Canyon brings up a mall in
Israel, Burj Khalifa is somehow underwater, Eifel Tower brings up Las Vegas,
Roman Colosseum some residential street in Houston. Statue of Liberty and Taj
Mahal are the only two landmarks I tried it got correct. I get it's a "beta",
but ouch. If you can't get addresses or major landmarks correct this shouldn't
even be public facing yet.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
> It's the same issue I have with Open Street Maps, if you're not in
> SF/NYC/Chi they're damn near useless

OSM long-time mapper here. SF and NYC are not our strong points. Europe is our
strong point.

~~~
lucb1e
I think for the Americans, contributing data feels too much like work which
would violate their idea of letting the free market do its thing. Where would
the world go if people just did things for free? Same as with self check-outs,
you ain't gonna do that work yourself if you're not getting a discount!

~~~
olah_1
To be fair, contributing to OSM _is_ more work in America. You have to drive
every where and you technically aren't allowed to use other maps as a source
(I don't know if that's ever followed though)

------
solarkraft
Why support proprietary Apple Maps instead of Open Street Map? Is the data a
lot more precise? Is the viewer smoother?

Is it just another step towards aligning with Apple for an eventual
buyout/search engine standard?

That said: If privacy is the only concern Apple seems to be a pretty good
ally, as the only major player with a significant interest in it.

~~~
Freak_NL
> Is the data a lot more precise?

Perhaps in Apple's own backyard. In the Netherlands it's laughably bad. Cycle
tracks? Mostly missing (in a country that has a huge cycling infrastructure).
The map doesn't even have building outlines.

Google Maps is slightly better, but mostly because of the more extensive
mapping of points-of-interest; because business owners add their own
information with an almost religious zeal.

Bing interestingly enough uses OpenStreetMap (and properly attributes its
usage) to gain access to the municipally contributed building outlines
OpenStreetMap can use due to its permissive licence. The roads are their own
though, and they are quite inaccurate at the lower end of the road hierarchy.

OpenStreetMap is probably the most complete map here in the Netherlands
(disclaimer: I contribute to OpenStreetMap).

DuckDuckGo using Apple Maps instead of OpenStreetMap is a really weird choice
for many countries, but perhaps it works better in the US?

~~~
danieldk
_Perhaps in Apple 's own backyard. In the Netherlands it's laughably bad.
Cycle tracks? Mostly missing (in a country that has a huge cycling
infrastructure). The map doesn't even have building outlines._

Apple uses Tom Tom data. We never had serious problems with car navigation in
Germany where we lived before and in The Netherlands.

Bike navigation is indeed bad, but it is also bad with Google Maps once you
cycle in nature (outside cities). Then nothing beats a good Garmin GPS with
paid maps (e.g. Topo Germany Pro and Topo Benelux), which do not only contain
smaller cycling roads, unpaved roads, etc. but typically also contain paths
recommended by national cycling associations (ActiveRouting). Unfortunately,
it seems they are not updating maps frequently anymore, I guess it's a small
market. I hope that OpenStreetMap continues to pick up the slack.

~~~
inferiorhuman
_Apple uses Tom Tom data. We never had serious problems with car navigation in
Germany where we lived before and in The Netherlands._

The car navigation in Germany was fine with Apple Maps for me (although I only
used it for one trip), but the public transit info was mostly missing.

------
jakecopp
It's a shame they didn't invest in OpenStreetMap.

Their values would align significantly, and OpenStreetMap has excellent road
and path coverage in my experience (though struggles with Points of Interest).

~~~
Maxious
They do invest in improving the project
[https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/](https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/)

------
oldgun
Not sure if it's a lot to ask, but I'll consider it a killer app if DDG can
let user opt which map source to choose from? e.g. Some may prefer Google, and
some may prefer openstreetmap?

Just a thought.

~~~
bilbo0s
Pretty sure you can forget about DDG supporting Google. The whole point of DDG
is privacy. Not sure how they could use Google and still keep your location
information private?

~~~
scrooched_moose
They do have the !g option in their search though. If you aren't happy with
the results, append your string with !g and it will send you to google
results. You do lose the privacy layer though.

From a purely privacy standpoint this isn't much different.

There are a ton of other bang options here:

[https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)?

~~~
Erik816
I was under the impression that a !g search was somehow anonymized. Was that
just wishful thinking?

~~~
buzzerbetrayed
It surprises me how many people think this. I'm not sure where it comes from.
All it does is redirect you to Google.

So `!g hello world` just redirects to
`[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hello%20world`](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hello%20world`)

I'm can't see how that could possibly be more anonymized then just going to
google.com yourself.

~~~
lucb1e
> I'm not sure where it comes from

I guess because it makes zero sense the way it is. What's the point? Might as
well have gone to Google directly. And what DDG user would ever want to be
redirected to Google? They're using DDG for a reason (and for 99%, it isn't
the search engine quality). It just makes no sense.

> I'm [sic] can't see how that could possibly be more anonymized then [sic]
> just going to google.com yourself.

DDG could proxy the traffic the way startpage does.

~~~
danskeren
> I guess because it makes zero sense the way it is. What's the point?

There are over 10.000 different bang shortcuts. They’re very valuable for
several reasons, especially if you make DDG your default search engine.
“Denmark !w” will take you to Denmark’s Wikipedia page, saving you the time
and bandwidth it would take to click on the link through the DDG/Google
result. Similarly, you can search “hello !gtda”; and sure, for short
translation queries then you could also just type “hello danish” in Google,
but try doing that with an entire paragraph. You could also search “duckduckgo
!gandi” to see available duckduckgo domains on Gandi (or whichever domain
registrar you prefer).

> And what DDG user would ever want to be redirected to Google? They're using
> DDG for a reason (and for 99%, it isn't the search engine quality). It just
> makes no sense.

DDG users aren’t (or at least they shouldn’t) append !g to all their
searches.. it should only be used as a last resort (and even then they should
still be using !s instead of !g). DDG’s primary selling point is privacy, but
even if they were just as evil as Google (and there were no other privacy-
friendly alternative available) then I’d still be using DDG as my default
search engine thanks to the bang shortcuts.

> DDG could proxy the traffic the way startpage does.

That would defeat the purpose of the bang shortcuts, which is to take you to
the search results on other sites. Besides, they already offer this through
!s.

------
pwinnski
I was a big defender of Apple Maps, largely because I almost never saw any
problems with the data. Then I moved into an apartment complex in which Apple
had the driveway in the wrong place.

I've moved since, so I'll spell it out:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=5940+Arapaho+Rd%2C+75248&t=osx&ia=...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=5940+Arapaho+Rd%2C+75248&t=osx&ia=maps&iaxm=maps)

Apple Maps believes that the driveways are to the south and east, but in fact
the front driveway--the main entrance--is to the north, and there is no direct
passage from the east. So every set of directions to or from those apartments
begins or ends incorrectly. When leaving, I just have to guess whether I
should turn east on Arapaho to catch up to where Maps thinks I should have
ended up on Preston to start out, or whether it will send me west on Arapaho
once it realizes I'm already most of a block in that direction from Preston.
It added a minute or two to every trip, and delivery people would fail to find
my apartment unless I specifically said "don't use Apple Maps." So I started
saying that to everyone, all the time.

Apple's commitment to privacy means that they deliberately don't track the
beginning or ending of any trip, but that's precisely the bits they needed to
track to see that their routing was completely and totally wrong. So the
problem will apparently never be fixed, at least until an Apple employee
happens to want to visit a friend who lives in the Enclave at Prestonwood and
realizes they can't get there.

So I've switched to Google Maps, and I _loathe_ the lack of privacy, but I
love the sharing option, so I guess I'm staying, even though I live elsewhere
now.

~~~
saagarjha
> So the problem will apparently never be fixed, at least until an Apple
> employee happens to want to visit a friend who lives in the Enclave at
> Prestonwood and realizes they can't get there.

Or you can report the issue yourself in-app?

~~~
pwinnski
I haven't figured out how, but since I've gone to the trouble to complain in
public, I should dig in and see if I can.

------
soneca
Tangentially, I noticed that when I start typing a word in my Chrome URL input
field, it started to privilege Google searches instead of websites I normally
visit.

It is very annoying to type _" n <enter>"_ and it goes on to search any query
starting with _" n"_ that I happened to have searched in the past instead of
going to HN as it was the case for the last several years.

It is happening now with all my usual "shortcuts".

Chrome now is less a browser and more a Google widget.

I wonder if I change the default search engine to DuckDuckGo it would still be
the case.

~~~
baobrain
This is a chrome flag you can toggle: omnibox-drive-suggestions

Alternatively, use Firefox.

~~~
skizm
Firefox (at least for me) does the same thing and pushes search results before
websites. I have to arrow or tab down 4-5 selections before I get to the first
website result in the url/search bar.

~~~
tryptophan
Options->Search->untick "Show search suggestions ahead of browsing history in
address bar results"

------
larrysalibra
I thought people complaining in the comments were just being critical, but I
clicked the “coffee shops” example search in the post - I’m in Hong Kong - and
it showed me only 2 results:

One coffee shop in Hong Kong and one on the other side of the Pearl River
Delta in Macau. That’s pretty bad. Screenshot here:
[https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/1151182624108318720?...](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/1151182624108318720?s=21)

~~~
dmix
That looks more like it has to do with query detection than the lack of
results. It clearly didn’t understand the Hong Kong part, which is the main
issue.

~~~
PunchTornado
are people using apple maps completely different than google maps? 90% of the
time I use map for searching places, shops etc. If apple maps is not excelling
at that, why do people use it?

~~~
Austin_Conlon
I use it for transit times to a handful of places in the Bay Area I regularly
visit, and it works well for that. One glaring search problem I have though is
for a contact, it will only show the result for the first two letters of the
name and then when I continue typing it shows anything that’s not the
contact’s address. This is even despite getting directions to the contact
several times.

------
jcampbell1
Google maps recently made nice improvements when search history is turned off.
It used to nag constantly to turn search history on and now it no longer does
that and saves searches on my device with a clear setting to turn it off.

The ability to limit the duration of search history is another nice feature.

I feel less inclined to use Apple maps these days.

------
m8rl
In my region (Germany) Apple Maps are not very helpful, compared to
Openstreetmap they are incomplete and/or years back. I absoluty can't see why
they chose to use them.

~~~
xenospn
Probably comes down to API access and/or pricing. Privacy focused mapping
services are quite rare. I'd do the same in their place.

~~~
m8rl
I see this as an ill-informed decision, from a viewpoint of someone living in
a big western city. Results are so error-prone, it's basically useless in 99%
of the locations in the world. Even Google has so much wrong information
gathered from out-of-date websites and public registers. Even in central
Berlin.

~~~
xenospn
How do the results compare to openstreetmaps?

------
SanchoPanda
For those interested in the differences between the maps providers, Justin
OBeirne has a set of absolutely wonderful blog posts on them. I look forward
to the next one.

[https://www.justinobeirne.com/](https://www.justinobeirne.com/)

------
JansjoFromIkea
About a year ago Apple maps helped me find the entrance to an airport when
Google maps was absolutely insisting the only entrance was something extremely
wrong. Outside of waving someone down on a motorway to get directions (yes I
was really dumb and walked alongside a major road to an airport, had a lot of
free time...) or paying an absolute ton to get a taxi to find me and take me
to the correct entrance I was probably going to miss my flight home if I
didn't think to try Apple maps.

Anyways, it was a really good lesson in the value of checking multiple sources
of truth, which gets harder and harder to remember as Google penetrate further
into our lives.

------
garysahota93
I love Google Maps a lot but it's becoming very bloated. I would love to use
Apple Maps, but I just don't trust it to be reliable and comprehensive enough
on the basic features I need.

------
eric_khun
Talking about maps, is anyone has a "Direction API" cheaper than Google maps?
Google maps is excessively expensive ( 5USD per 1000 queries [1] ) for my side
project. I'm trying to get an estimate time (driving and public transport)
between 2 places in large city.

Any suggestions welcome!

[1] [https://developers.google.com/maps/billing/understanding-
cos...](https://developers.google.com/maps/billing/understanding-cost-of-
use#directions)

------
philshem
Does anyone else see Apple buying DDG in the near future?

~~~
burlesona
Probably not. Apple is cautious about acquisitions and doesn’t generally buy
things that have a consumer brand, they don’t really do advertising supported
products, and they’re also mindful of anti-trust. My guess is that in the
search space they see DDG as a useful partner, much like they see Yelp, but
they’re not trying to expand into that business so an acquisition wouldn’t do
much for them.

------
gen3
I'm glad they are expanding usage of Apple maps. I hope that people will start
using it more. In its older state it was a pain to search for things. I wonder
if they will expand to using the routing so you don't need to leave for
directions.

------
vkaku
What I'd want is Apple Maps and Here Maps to enter into a technology/business
collaboration agreement.

Here Maps have excellent tech and offline packaging and Apple has the reach.

Put all this together with DDG, we have a winner.

~~~
manuelmagic
I absolutely agree! I'm kinda disappointed that nobody else talked about Here
Maps in the comments. Nobody use it?

------
arendtio
It would be so cool if they would add an option to select the preferred map
provider. Obviously, preferences differ and for other features (e.g.
directions source) they already have such options.

------
ancorevard
I love Apple Maps' Dark Mode.

~~~
ducktypegoose
I think the true hero of the story is whoever made dark mode for maps a thing.

------
sirn
IMHO, one of the best thing in Apple Maps is that they localized the street
names to those one familiar to locals. I live in Bangkok, and Google Maps
always say something like “Road No. 3” (which was not wrong, but nobody here
calls it that) whereas Apple Maps correctly identify them as “Sukhumvit Road”.

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goda90
It seems to still have the dropdown to select which mapping service, but it
doesn't change when you use it, and Apple maps isn't on the list. But the map
it shows me does have the Apple logo in the corner.

~~~
gruez
Are you talking about the drop down right under the "directions" button? I
believe that's for navigation only. ie. if you choose "google", and click the
directions button, it opens google maps in a new tab, and if you change it to
bing, it opens bing maps in a new tab.

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DevKoala
My experience with Apple Maps in California has been great. They had my home
address wrong for a bit, so I submitted a correction and the map updated in
two days from my request. That was the only issue I ever had.

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paul7986
Great..adamant DDG user!

One thing I look forward to is the ability to get the distance from X to Y in
DDG.

I’m not sure if this something many do as well but personally it’s probably
one of my top ten things I Routinely search(Weekly) for.

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carusooneliner
Took DDG Enhanced Maps for a test drive:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EnmdbzdOWI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EnmdbzdOWI)

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LUmBULtERA
I would use Apple Maps significantly more if it allowed me to download maps
for offline navigation, like I can with Google Maps.

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SanchoPanda
Why does neither maps.duckduckgo.com or duckduckgo.com/maps take me to the
maps interface?

Thats the number one way I access google maps.

~~~
mperham
Likewise. Note ddg.co works too, saves lots of typing.

~~~
SanchoPanda
My brain doesn't do .co. No matter how I try. Duck.com works for me though.

~~~
mkl
I hadn't caught up with that. Duck.com is a relatively recent development:
[https://edgy.app/duckduckgo-search-engine-duck-
com](https://edgy.app/duckduckgo-search-engine-duck-com)

None of the articles I found explain how DuckDuckGo managed to convince Google
to give it to them.

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known
Unlike Apple Maps, Google Maps are "powered" by Android devices

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konart
Unfortunatelly Apple Maps are irrelevant outside the US though.

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josefresco
What service did DDG use before Apple Maps?

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Mapbox.

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Mindwipe
DuckDuckGo making itself less useful then.

