
Apple's New Map - joao
https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps
======
reaperducer
_It absolutely blows my mind that map products ship without street names
clearly visible at all times._

I agree. The place where Google Maps and, to a slightly lesser extent, Apple
Maps fall down is in labeling roads.

I can't count the number of times I've zoomed in on a map and it shows every
little sushi joint in the neighborhood, but no street names. And no amount of
zooming in or out will fix it.

It's similarly frustrating when Apple and Google show a highway shield instead
of a street name in an urban area. Yes, lots of streets in urban areas are
also state highways. But the state highway designations only appear in real
life every few miles, while the street signs I'm standing under appear on
every corner.

But the greatest sin is omission. Each month I have to render about 70,000
maps from towns and cities from the Philippines to Nova Scotia. And every
month I spend three days manually placing towns and businesses that exist in
no online maps.

And it's not just tiny towns on far away islands. I'm talking about places in
Oklahoma and Arizona and even California that either don't exist, or are
stupendously wrong.

Sometimes I fantasize about having a full-time job driving around the country
fixing all of Apple Maps' faults. But somehow I suspect the pay would be
terrible.

~~~
bluntfang
>Sometimes I fantasize about having a full-time job driving around the country
fixing all of Apple Maps' faults. But somehow I suspect the pay would be
terrible.

I've thought about doing this too, but for hiking trails. I'm sure the pay
would be abysmal, but hiking and updating online maps sounds like a blast as a
job. I think it could be done fairly well with a simple GPS recorder and
serialization, but the biggest challenge would be managing the partnership
between the map customers like google and apple..

If anyone wants to fund this and/or has the connections to play sales/product
manager, DM me.. :p

~~~
Thrymr
There is a huge amount of this information maintained by land management
agencies (see e.g. [0]). Presumably it is even licensed (in the US at least)
in a way that commercial companies could use. But Google Maps coverage of
trails and even forest roads is terrible. I presume that you're right, the
return is too low, but it is sad that no one is picking up this low hanging
fruit. Even OpenStreetMap is hit and miss on this public data (partly because
of data import wars).

[0]
[https://data.fs.usda.gov/geodata/edw/datasets.php?dsetCatego...](https://data.fs.usda.gov/geodata/edw/datasets.php?dsetCategory=transportation)

~~~
ghaff
I conclude that Google has decided once you get off of "normal" roads, it just
doesn't care. (One even wonders if Google considers omitting paths that aren't
reliable for automobiles to be a feature rather than a bug.) As you say, OSM
is better but can't really be depended on.

------
mastazi
Another great article from this blog!

Last year's article from the same author [1] about Goggle Maps' use of
photogrammetry and other building scanning techiques was, in my opinion, one
of the most interesting HN submissions ever (its comment section[2] is also
worth a read).

[1] [https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-
moat](https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653)

~~~
saagarjha
He's written multiple articles about maps, even before that one:
[https://www.justinobeirne.com](https://www.justinobeirne.com). He's very good
at spotting details in maps–IIRC he worked on Apple's maps team before, so
this isn't particularly surprising.

~~~
NelsonMinar
He wrote many more excellent articles before he worked at Apple, all posted to
[https://www.41latitude.com/](https://www.41latitude.com/)

Sadly he took them down, disappeared into the memory hole the way so many
Apple employee's work has a way of doing. I'm glad he's out and writing in
public again.

~~~
Scoundreller
Well, they are CC 3.0, so I guess I can't feel guilty about sharing these 3
archives that I found:

[https://archive.is/Fnw4W](https://archive.is/Fnw4W)
[https://archive.is/AHmEF](https://archive.is/AHmEF)
[https://archive.is/WpOCJ](https://archive.is/WpOCJ)

------
mulmen
This is really neat but I don't really care about greenery when I'm using
Apple Maps. Can they take a break from figuring out how to convert satellite
images into green blobs and devise an algorithm to put street names _on the
screen_?

Apple and Google maps are both worthless as maps without typing in an actual
address and using navigation because they can't just show the main cross
street names on the screen. It absolutely blows my mind that map products ship
without street names clearly visible at all times.

The before/after map of downtown SF actually shows _less_ useful data about
the city. It no longer shows the names of Mission or Market streets. The fancy
3D representations of buildings don't help me negotiate on the ground.

~~~
crazygringo
It's obviously an intentional choice to avoid too much screen clutter...

but I agree it's infuriating. I've spoken in the past with some people who
work on Maps products and have heard "people say they want it but then they
really don't..." and I honestly can't imagine what UX studies are telling them
that.

 _All the time_ I see a destination and I'm trying to figure out what closest
cross street I should stop at and by the time I've zoomed and panned enough to
find whatever random faraway place manages to have a label (feels like an
unwanted game of whack-a-mole, where will the label pop up??), I can't tell if
I've zoomed over to a parallel street instead.

And the solution is so simple too: _whenever you zoom in enough that there 's
enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label!_ I mean if
I zoom in so far that _only_ the _one_ street is visible and there's _no_
other text on it, but Maps _still_ leaves it blank... it just feels
inexcusable.

~~~
ryandrake
I’ve worked on mapping software, and in fact on street name placement (Not
Google or Apple). The code we had for deciding where and when to draw street
names has to be among the most complicated, full-of-edge-cases code I have
ever encountered. Engineering is pulling one direction, data providers are
pulling another direction. UX is pulling this direction, cartography is
pulling that direction. Everybody in the company wants to bike-shed about it
and insert their opinions because the problem to them “seems so easy.”

I’m not going to go into too many specifics but for most map products I’ve
worked on, the usual reason that a label doesn’t appear somewhere is because
the map data provider hard-codes the potential places where a label could be
displayed, and it’s not “everywhere along the road”. You might be zooming into
a place where a cartographer chose not to add a label point. Good map software
will try to sensibly fill in these gaps but are not perfect. Too aggressive
about adding labels and you have the artists and cartographers telling you
some areas on the map are too cluttered. Not aggressive enough, and some areas
on the map are bare.

It’s maddening getting those bugs saying “I think there are too many labels”,
backing it off, then a few days later getting the bugs, “I can’t find the
street label next to my house!” Lots of simple-to-whiteboard solutions would
work well for your particular neighborhood but look terrible in Manhattan or
rural Idaho, not to mention Japan. It’s really not simple.

~~~
ethbro
I think the thing that confuses me and parent is that Maps ALREADY knows about
road continuity. And road names.

I'm sure I'm missing something, but (1) flow labels along their roads to the
center of the screen, (2) separate them with predefined padding, (3) drop
labels if visible label count > maximum, smallest-to-largest road, until under
the threshold.

If UXers want to bitch, hide it behind a layer filter. But honestly, #&@+
them. (Sorry, but we are talking about maps that _don 't show road names_
here)

~~~
cooper12
> but we are talking about maps that don't show road names here

That presumes that road names are an intrinsic part of a map. While they
certainly were in the past, I think there's a paradigm shift happening that's
become so common we don't notice it anymore. We don't tell people to meet us
at "The intersection of Street X and Y" as much anymore, we tell them to meet
us near a prominent landmark like a park, train station, or restaurant. We
barely even need street names for navigation anymore; instead, our software
tells us how many blocks to walk and when to turn (even automobile GPS tells
us to expect turns in the next X miles). I feel this will be part of a larger
revolution where we might start using alternative easy-to-shate GPS
coordinates [0], and even completely new map styles like isochrone maps. [1]

[0]: See [https://what3words.com/](https://what3words.com/) and Google's
[https://plus.codes/](https://plus.codes/)

[1]: [https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/isochrone-maps-
commute...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/isochrone-maps-commutes-
travel-times)

~~~
crazygringo
> We don't tell people to meet us at "The intersection of Street X and Y" as
> much anymore, we tell them to meet us near a prominent landmark like a park,
> train station, or restaurant.

Citation needed. As a New Yorker, intersections of streets are how we do it
all the time, when you want to meet on the street to walk somewhere together.
"Meet me on 23rd and 8th."

> We barely even need street names for navigation anymore; instead, our
> software tells us how many blocks to walk and when to turn (even automobile
> GPS tells us to expect turns in the next X miles).

When streets are closely spaced, the name is absolutely necessary to know
which one to turn onto -- you can pass a whole street in the time it takes the
GPS to start and stop speaking and have no idea which street the "next street"
refers to.

And plenty of people still walk or bike, where they check their phone only
occasionally and memorize the name of the next street they need to stop at or
turn on.

Sure there are new use cases, but the old ones aren't going away at all.

------
docker_up
The original Google Maps showed all the street names on all the streets, so
you didn't have to guess.

Later versions of Google Maps didn't do this, so on some streets, you would
have no idea what the street names were, and would have to zoom out or scroll
out until you saw the name.

THIS is what I want fixed. I don't care about vegetation, I want to be able to
see what the street names are without distracting myself on the map.

~~~
puzzle
The original Google Maps was pre-rendered in a gigantic MapReduce. It had many
fewer landmarks.

The modern Google Maps does a lot of the layout and rendering on the client or
on the fly, with a differing set of constraints and tradeoffs. It also has
many more landmarks.

You can see this in action by going to
[https://mapstyle.withgoogle.com/](https://mapstyle.withgoogle.com/) and
playing with the "Landmarks" control.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
That's great, if the rendering is performed on the client then there's no
excuse not to include a "show street names at all times" option.

------
nazca
I think the author missed that the old version, and Google Maps currently,
typically use green to denote certain types of public land (parks, national
forest, etc.) not vegetation per se. Apple is solving a different use case by
color coding by vegetation. And It's one that I think is less useful. KNowing
that there is vegetation on someone else's private land isn't really that
useful to me. But knowing the boundaries of a national forest is extremely
useful.

~~~
ehsankia
Indeed. Having hyper accurate greenery mapping may make for a cool tech demo,
but has very little utility. Maps are about information density and color
utility. Having 10 different shades of green doesn't really convey anything
that's useful for my normal usecase.

~~~
toasterlovin
Disagree, FWIW. Knowing how the land is shaped and what’s on it helps me
navigate much better. Green things on the map that don’t correspond to green
things in the environment are not super useful to me.

~~~
pmontra
Don't we have aerial and satellite view for that? Disclaimer: I don't know if
Apple Maps has a satellite view (never owned an Apple device) and I very
rarely use Google Maps for navigation so I don't know if those views can be
used while navigating.

However I've got the feeling that the new and less detailed maps are made for
the use case of navigation, with a voice telling us what to do. Road names are
important only when we are discovering what's around us or where we want to
go. If this is a less important use case now, street names go away. Still it
should be possible to build an app that works on a sensible way in both
navigation and discovery mode.

~~~
gukov
The satellite view is great to look at, but it provides way too much
information to be useful in a spur of a moment. It also usually requires a few
taps to get to (Menu > Layers > Satellite). Apple is betting on a hybrid
approach it seems.

------
heavymark
This is a great write up but aweful news for us Apple users who finally
thought Apple would be able to catch up with Google Maps. That is the only
have part of one state and will be many years until the whole country but the
promise that the new data would be near perfect made it worth the wait. Apple
continues to favor manual vs automated such as news and music and in each case
googles automated approach wins out. Yes Apple is backing privacy which is
fine but they shouldn’t say they can offer equal or better features and also
pursuing the privacy strategy. POI and Yelp has been the major issue with
Apple Maps and this review shows they aren’t changing in this regard so now we
have better vegetation but same POI issues. Very disappointing.

~~~
toasterlovin
I’m pretty sure the plan is to roll out the rest of the US in the next year.
Not sure about the rest of the world, though.

~~~
degenerate
I'll be interested to see if they are unsatisfied with the way middle-America
looks, and invent some way of showing corn and wheat in the maps software,
further delaying the rollout.

The vegetation data is literally the last thing that matters, and I can't
believe Apple is this blind.

------
jameshatheway
I used to live in the Cayman Islands (Grand Cayman specifically), and my issue
with Apple Maps is, forget about the enhanced details being mentioned in this
article, the actual landmass on the map is WRONG, and I just checked - its
still wrong. Roads and roundabouts and my condo, and Camana Bay (big mixed
commercial living area) apparently in the ocean. Its been like this since they
introduced it.

Here's a side by side of West Bay, Seven Mile Beach and Boddentown, between
Apple Maps on the left and Google Maps on the right.

I understand that its not a huge market (even though there's something like 2
million+ cruise shippers stopping every year), but man... it really makes me
not trust it anywhere when the map is completely wrong, geographically
speaking

[https://i.imgur.com/4DaiXyp.png](https://i.imgur.com/4DaiXyp.png)
[https://i.imgur.com/f5nerNY.png](https://i.imgur.com/f5nerNY.png)

~~~
doque
I wonder how this happens. If Apple has the capacity to detect grass strips
between roads, how do they misplace an entire part of town (into the ocean, no
less). Isn't there some sort of process in place to detect false positives?

~~~
londons_explore
This often happens when a map is made from data purchased from different
suppliers.

Imagine you buy in the outline of landmasses from some other company. If you
pay staff to 'correct' those errors, it will be mostly wasted effort, since
those changes won't be sent back to the supplier and won't make it into the
next version of the suppliers data.

Likewise, if you start merging your data and their data in a way which isn't
100% legally separable, you get into all kinds of trouble. Flagging up where
your own street map is in conflict with the suppliers ocean map could could as
'deriving' your street map from their ocean map, meaning you no longer have
all the rights to your street map.

------
geekrax
I cannot fail to notice how many # of ads, notifications, various asks, pop-
ups, disclaimers, endorsements, contact buttons or share buttons there are on
this page compared to what we see in any other piece of content with as much
detailed information.

The author definitely enjoys compiling these amazing essays and share this
knowledge.

Thank you, Justin!

~~~
nicbou
Right? Pure content. I'm saving it as inspiration.

------
Osmose
> And the office’s large headcount (now near 5,000) suggests some sort of
> manual / labor-intensive process.

My partner briefly worked for a human-powered 3d mapping firm; they would get
satellite and plane/drone photography of a large swath of land, split it up
into block-sized chunks, and then each worker would take a block and use an
in-house program to model the buildings at a pretty impressive level of
detail. Workers got paid per-block and blocks were priced based on their
complexity. They've been doing this for over 10 years by this point, so it's
not an entirely unknown or uncommon thing to handle this kind of work
manually.

~~~
ksec
Is this even sustainable in a "World" Scale? Because at this rate I don't see
this brings Apple to cover all the major cities of world in 10 years time, let
alone majority of lands which aren't in these locations.

~~~
londons_explore
Each building in the world probably took thousands of man-hours to construct.
Mapping said building probably takes a matter of minutes.

In a world sense, the economics of making the map are very cheap.

~~~
Osmose
More than minutes, but absolutely orders of magnitude less than it took to
build them.

In an ideal future, one can imagine submitting 3d models of buildings to a
civic dataset as part and parcel of getting zoning approval.

------
imgabe
You know what I really never use the map on my phone for?

Figuring out how many trees there are.

Do the directions work?

~~~
stevenjohns
That's your use case. I've used maps a lot to try to find hidden or secluded
parks -- often with great success.

I'm talking postcard-perfect views around the Sydney harbor, small beaches
around various bays, isolated parks near beautiful rivers and a whole lot of
other places that are really beautiful and probably only known to the locals.
Lots of these places were a brisk walk away from high-traffic areas too.

This is not to dismiss your question on the directions, though, which is
certainly an important part of using maps on a phone.

~~~
crazygringo
That's great... but wouldn't satellite view be better for that anyways?

Would you even trust an "interpreted" map with levels of green for what you're
doing?

~~~
BoorishBears
I have a knack for finding good driving roads with Google Maps.

It doesn’t really work in satellite view because the trees make for a ton of
visual noise at the relatively low resolutions shown.

A good indicator for me is green in the map, and no street view (street view
tends to cover busier routes, I drive roads street view wouldn’t bother with)

------
bitcurious
>In other words, TomTom’s database somehow has roads from Parkfield’s boomtown
days—roads that have been gone for more than 75 years. No wonder why Apple
removed them.

Another possible explanation is the TomTom was using these unlikely to be
visited streets as trap streets.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street)

>In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a
misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally
covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map
who, if caught, would be unable to explain the inclusion of the "trap street"
on their map as innocent. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright
trap" features may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.

~~~
underwater
Using streets from maps that predate TomTom’s maps defeats the purpose of a
trap street. The plagiariser could just claim to have sourced the data from
old, public domain, sources.

~~~
bitcurious
True, but that is assuming that those streets ever existed. As far as I can
tell from the article that's just an assumption.

Although I think it would actually be possible to use once-real-but-no-longer
steets as trap streets, as long as your sources are improbable enough. For
example, if you take a map from 1908, remove one street, then add in another
single street from 1920, etc., your exact combination of streets could serve
as proof of copyright infringement.

~~~
ska
sounds like more work than just making some trap streets.

It brings up an interesting issue though - ideally if you have trap streets
you would never want to use them in route finding...

~~~
qubex
I hope they have some manner of “shearing off” the nodes that represent those
streets and break the graph into two disjoint ones. That way they’re off on
their own little island without a ferry connection and problems only arise if
you ask for a route to, or are starting from within, somewhere that actually
doesn’t have any ground truth.

------
rconti
Funny that the author mentions the Markleeville Courthouse as being across the
street from the General Store, when it is, in fact, next door, as shown in the
picture. I'm sure plenty of us on HN have cycled through Markleeville a couple
of times in mid-July...

I've always found Google vs Apple maps discussions to be interesting, as I've
always vastly preferred Apple Maps data for walking around places; Google Maps
too often had poor building shapes that looked nothing like the real thing, or
hid business names at the scale I was trying to use. Perhaps that's because I
live in the Bay Area. When I'm overseas, in particular, I don't hesitate to go
to Google Maps first.

------
jillesvangurp
Hilarious that they consider the job done after covering the Bay area. They
are years away from doing this world wide. Most of their iphone revenue is
from outside of California.

I used to work in Nokia in the maps division that later became Here. I still
remember when Nokia disrupted a market then dominated by the likes Tom Tom and
a few others by giving away the maps for free along with every phone.
Initially this was a subscription service that you had to opt into. But
releasing it for free changed a lot of things.

One of those things was Google accelerating their own maps production and
terminating their licensing of Nokia's Navteq maps. It took them many years
after that to catch up in terms of quality after that. They had to rely on
Teleatlas (now Tom Tom) for quite some time while slowly building out their
maps. This is a huge investment and a lot of work. I'd say they definitely
pulled ahead only a few years ago with very decent world wide coverage for
most of their feature set. Here maps is still better qualitatively in some
areas but their feature set is just not great at this point and they've lost
most of the consumer mind share they used to have under Nokia. They are still
unrivaled for offline navigation on the road and they completely own the in
car navigation market at this point (around 70-80% marketshare).

Apple maps inception was around 2011ish around the time their relationship
with Google soured. Actually several of my former colleagues ended up working
for them after the Nokia implosion. They prematurely launched the first
version and they are still heavily dependent on Tom Tom's Teleatlas (again)
after last year's revision which improved things considerably. The stuff in
this article is nice but world coverage like this is quite far out. Also, you
can bet Google will take the hint and get their hands dirty improving their
algorithms. The genius with their operation is that they are really good at
collecting data, so new algorithms can be applied world wide. This is where
Apple is behind: they lack the data coverage that Google has been investing in
for the last decade.

~~~
gambiting
I would say map quality for someone living outside of the "bubble", map
quality goes as follows:

TomTom then Google Maps then literally anything else, then Apple Maps at the
very end. It's hilarious how empty Apple Maps are, and considering that until
very recently they were the only option for Apple CarPlay for navigation, that
was extremely bad. Seriously, it was so bad that I would consider my car's
built-in, shitty 5-year old sat nav system over using Apple Maps, it's that
bad. Google Maps is still lacking in many many aspects(it has no idea which
streets are one way, has no idea about no-left/right turn signs, it still
connects roads on the map which are not connected in reality, its database of
POI is lackluster at best - TomTom doesn't seem to have any of those issues),
but god, Apple Maps outside of US is just bad.

~~~
Mindwipe
It literally boggles my mind why Apple still think using Yelp for POI data is
a good idea.

Yelp to all intents and purposes does not exist outside of the continental
Americas. London's Yelp data is essentially the work of the odd bored American
tourist. As such, it's totally wrong.

I do not see how Apple improves this situation from this article. Google have
an amazing advantage here.

~~~
coldtea
> _It literally boggles my mind why Apple still think using Yelp for POI data
> is a good idea._

As opposed to what source of readily available data?

They already use several sources anyway (including their own scanning), Yelp
is just one of many.

~~~
fs111
Foursquare would be a better source as that is still popular in many European
countries.

~~~
macintux
They use Foursquare.

------
forgot-my-pw
Always a joy to read this website's map analysis. You can really see a lot of
work has been put by both vendors through time.

------
foobarian
I could't figure out if the author was being sarcastic by stressing the
vegetation detail so much. Certainly seemed like an interesting focus.

~~~
max76
I think the author has a genuine passion for maps, and finds the vegetation to
be a great feature.

~~~
floatrock
But that's what I _don 't_ like about the apple map. Check out the image where
he says:

> Regardless of how Apple is creating all of its buildings and other shapes,
> Apple is filling its map with so many of them that Google now looks empty in
> comparison:

[https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54ff63f0e4b0bafce6932...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54ff63f0e4b0bafce6932642/t/5bdb46f9898583b78153b620/1541097217246/1-46+Carmel+-+Google.gif?format=1500w)

Yeah, the google view has a lot less green, but it's really a different _kind_
of green -- it shows me where there's a public park I might visit.

Apple's green is showing vegetation, but finding that regional park gets lost
in the noise.

If I wanted to find a place to visit, Google is the superior layout. If I want
to get a sense of vegetation, I would just turn on satellite view!

~~~
puzzle
Google does have vegetation and desert data, but you can see that it starts to
fade around zoom level 5 in the US (at which you can only see a number of
entire states and the names of major cities).

If you go somewhere else on the planet, e.g. along the Amazon river, you see
that the vegetation data reappears, only to start fading again at zoom level
11 or so. It's too irregular and following satellite imagery too closely to
have been drawn from human sources such as parcel data. It must have been
built from imagery.

So it looks like it's a deliberate choice on Google's part to only use human-
derived features such as a park's outline at most zoom levels, on most of the
inhabited surface of the planet.

~~~
londons_explore
Describing zoom levels as numbers isn't common... Do you work for a mapping
provider?

~~~
puzzle
I used to work for Google, but not on maps. You can see the zoom level for
yourself in the URL. Use the scrollwheel or its trackpad equivalent and the Z
parameter in the address bar will change. That's where I got the numbers, not
any special knowledge.

------
rurban
Lol, he's comparing the two worst map distributors details, and comparing its
various mapping mistakes. I didn't see a word about the two other better maps:
Microsoft and OpenStreetMap.

Why Microsoft? They collaborated very early with a very good mapping
university institute, which invented creating 3d data from stereo images, from
air photos and car-level photos (for the facades), and so on, and then offered
the city and regional surveyor officed cooperation contracts. they usually
gave the best GIS data of all.

A few years later Google came into this business by getting the rights for US
satellite data, but with satellite data you are always behind. no 3d
extraction possible and always 4 years behind. local airplane stereo photos
are done yearly to find illegal buildings and collect taxes for them. they are
done by the state and cities.

OpenStreetMap is crowdfunded so the level of detail is unmatched of course.

I coded such 3d extraction from stereo photos in the late 80ies for our local
city land surveyor office. the roof details and height was much better then
than today's public data in Google or Apple' maps. feature extraction was half
automatic, guided with manual help.

~~~
macintux
He frequently uses map details as a proxy for looking at techniques and goals.
The details themselves are just an end to a means.

If you look at previous articles, he does a good job of analyzing Google’s
strategy for the future of maps.

Perhaps he feels Google’s ambitions in the AV space and vast data collection
capabilities in the mobile space make it a more interesting case study than
Microsoft’s or OSM’s.

------
CamperBob2
Why does he treat the presence of fans and HVAC units on building roofs as an
_advantage_ for Google Maps? Isn't that just meaningless visual clutter?
Unless I'm looking to land a helicopter on the roof, it's just distracting.

If I were working on maps at Google I'd be looking into ways to remove that
sort of content, not emphasize it. Maybe that's Apple's thinking as well.

------
ccostes
I wonder how many people missed the interesting conclusion of that article
(that places, not map details, are the key when we get to augmented reality
and self-driving) since it spent so much time analyzing the differences in the
new map and speculating on how they did it. That stuff was cool too, but I
think the author had a really good insight that most people are going to miss.

------
starchild_3001
I've been finding Apple's 3D maps a spectacular success over Google's for a
while. Yes, they do make it easier to find the building you're looking for.
And, give visual clues about where you should be driving. Very little clutter,
large fonts make it easier to see the map on your car dashboard. Well done,
Apple!

~~~
ajmurmann
How is the live traffic integration? I've been using Waze exclusively because
of traffic data. I'm otherwise not very fond of the app and would love to move
to something else, but the highly accurate and current traffic info is just
such a time saver

------
EugeneOZ
"USA is the only country on this planet". I'm thankful to Google Maps for
thinking otherwise.

------
keyle
On a side note I can't even imagine how big that webpage was. If you like
animated gifs, boy have I got the page for you!

All in all, what I've learnt is how many petabytes must be involved in mapping
the US and the world and the 3D aspects.

~~~
saagarjha
I'm left wondering how much data would be saved if they were videos rather
than GIFs. They'd probably end up being better quality, too!

~~~
forgot-my-pw
Most of the GIF only has 2 frames, a video won't be better and smaller.

~~~
gwern
That's even worse. He took a simple side-by-side comparison of 2 or 3 images,
and invested substantial effort into making it far more annoying and harder to
compare by an uncontrollable permanent headache inducing slow flicker which is
inferior to our built-in saccades. I hate the GIFs on his pages, they're by
far the worst thing on his site and why I don't reshare his otherwise very
interesting analyses, because they're a crime against the reader.

~~~
yen223
His use of gifs make differences _much_ easier to see, vs putting them side by
side.

~~~
vatueil
It works well for some of the comparisons, but for others I would really
prefer static shots so I can take my time examining each. Especially the GIFs
that compare more than two sources, such as the ones that include Here and
Bing as well as Google and Apple maps, where waiting for the GIF to cycle
through all four images is annoying.

If the author is willing to implement it, those things some websites use that
let the reader click the image or drag a sliding bar over it to compare might
work better.

Regardless, I do appreciate the author's insights.

------
dwighttk
I just want a mode where I can see a list of directions without starting turn
by turn navigation. I grew up in a time before turn by turn, and I do find it
useful the VERY few times I'm driving in completely new locations. But most of
the time I just want to see an overview of how to get to a place and then
maybe when it is time to get the last 2 or 3 turns read aloud to me. But no,
as soon as a choose a route my phone starts making unwanted noises and
blathering about turns I need to make to get out of my driveway.

~~~
pat2man
Apple Maps when using CarPlay does this pretty well. You can use overview mode
on the car display which gives you a map of your whole route. A list of
instructions comes up on your phone.

~~~
dwighttk
If only I could figure out how to get that without buying a new car.

~~~
macintux
Aftermarket radios are available. There’s even a single-DIN radio with a pop-
out larger display:
[https://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Car/NEX/AVH-3300NEX](https://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Car/NEX/AVH-3300NEX)

Wire Cutter has recommendations: [https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-car-
stereos-with-appl...](https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-car-stereos-with-
apple-carplay-and-android-auto/)

------
kbumsik
I'm using iPhone and iPad but I would never bother with Apple Map as long as
it's only available in their app.

I have marked a lot of stars and labels for places. If these are not available
on my Linux laptop or web browsers they are totally worthless.

I know Apple made MapKit for embedding and you can share links but it is miles
away from enough. Apple has to fully open their map for browsers and even
Android to make it actually useful but I doubt they will.

------
zawerf
I remember seeing a demo of pix2pix where this was one of targeted use cases.
[1]

There were even demos of the reverse, where you take a street map and convert
it back into a plausible photorealistic satellite image. [2]

[1] [https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/](https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/)
specifically
[https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/images/sat2map1_AtoB/late...](https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/images/sat2map1_AtoB/latest_net_G_val/index.html)

[2]
[https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/images/map2sat1_BtoA/late...](https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/images/map2sat1_BtoA/latest_net_G_val/index.html)

------
40acres
There's something really awesome about reading an in-depth report like this,
especially when you can feel the enthusiasm of the author. Dope work as
always.

------
cheeze
The maps stuff never ceases to amaze me. Seriously cool engineering going on
in these spaces!

------
mrfusion
It seems better if green is reserved for public parks. That way you can always
find places you can go. What use is all that green?

------
nod
This author just does such amazing work, consistently. A joy to read.

------
aetherspawn
I bought a second hand Lexus the other day.

Whilst Apple and Googles map display might be leagues ahead, the voice and
visual navigation in the Lexus hybrids or similar feels like it’s easily
decades ahead of both Apple and Google. Both in the quality of instruction
given, visual cues and even the sound of the voice.

Which really surprised me, because the last place I expected to find the best
navigation system I’d ever seen was a little closed system that hasn’t
received software updates since the car was built (2013).

------
mywacaday
Off topic but map related, though people here would like a look.

I've been browsing this recently for Ireland
[http://map.geohive.ie/mapviewer.html](http://map.geohive.ie/mapviewer.html)

Really nice tool to see old maps/aerial photos overlaid with current surveys.
Photos go back 25 years and maps back to the 1800s

Great use of public money by Ordnance Survey Ireland to provide public access
to public data.

------
saagarjha
Very interesting. Anecdotally, I've found the new Maps to be much better in
its level of detail–at least from the brief time I was able to use it this
summer–but from the article it looks like most of that might just be things to
make the map look pretty? It seems like Apple is extracting shapes from
satellite imagery to make their maps look better, but failing to include
actual business and place information.

------
sajagi
Google and Apple get all the glory - but some of you folks might find mapy.cz
useful, esp when traveling abroad. Mobile app offers even offline tourist maps
for the whole world, including contours --
[https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=-119.7422922&y=37.8326869&z=...](https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=-119.7422922&y=37.8326869&z=8)

~~~
rplnt
And the rendering is oh so much better than the Google's. Google maps without
aerial imagery is just a blur of grey. You can't see natural landmarks (even
basic forrest/not forrest), buildings, blocks, it's all roughly the same color
and the map is absolutely useless for what is map supposed to be. It's only
good for search and navigation. Of course they save their crap renderer by
having very good imagery.

Also, there's [https://windymaps.com/app](https://windymaps.com/app) which is
the same app I think, just focused on international users.

------
chaostheory
> Billions of people who can access and contribute to Google Map's place
> information via its website

This is both good and bad for Google Maps. Scammers have polluted Google Maps
with bad locksmith entries: [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/78-very-
quickly-to-the...](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/78-very-quickly-to-
the-drill)

------
bambax
Fantastic article (the gifs could be slower).

In general the article is very critical of Apple new maps, but at one point it
seems to commend them for removing roads that are no longer there:

> _Notice how many of Parkfield’s roads disappear on Apple’s new map. When
> Apple’s vans visited, they likely saw nothing but empty fields here those
> roads were supposed to be (...) TomTom’s database somehow has roads from
> Parkfield’s boomtown days—roads that have been gone for more than 75 years.
> No wonder why Apple removed them._

I've never been to Parkfield but I don't think removing old roads is a good
idea.

In the forests near Paris where I live, there are roads that were built 350
years ago and that ceased to be real "roads" about 150 years ago. Yet they are
still passable by foot or on a mountain bike.

Some maps have them (usually, Google maps have them all) and that helps a lot
when planning a bike trip for example. Some maps don't, and once you're in the
middle of the forest those maps tell you there's literally no way out, which
is ridiculous.

~~~
londons_explore
If they're passable on foot, they're now footpaths, and should be marked as
such.

~~~
bambax
Yes, but in the article it says that Apple cars couldn't ride on the roads and
that as a consequence the roads were removed from the map. If map makers need
to walk all footpaths the work will be immense...?

------
shaklee3
Whoever does these comparisons -- it's simply stunning. I look forward to all
your updates, and really appreciate the detail.

------
s1mon
They’ve added a bunch of green areas, but there is hardly any notation of
trails. Neither Google or Apple is great for trail maps in their default form,
but at least Google has higher contrast trail markings with names that are
occasionally readable. Apple maps are a miserable failure in this regard.

------
musgrove
It's hard to get excited about a work that's still so much in progress. Who
will be the target market and in what capacity for the final product? Or is
that not to be worried about? This seems like doing something because you can,
rather than a large demand for anything about it.

------
xvector
I think this article illustrates a critical issue with Apple's software. The
stance on privacy means little machine learning can take place. Little machine
learning means that Apple has to resort to more manual techniques. This, in
turn, leads to the far inferior (and often dangerously incorrect) place
databases and issues with their Maps application.

And then users will simply turn to an alternative which absolutely does not
care about their privacy, undoing all of Apple's effort in protecting their
users' privacy.

Apple needs to strike a balance between protecting users' privacy and
performing analytics. Perhaps send the data off-shore to a location not under
US jurisdiction, I don't know. But it is clear that Apple cannot keep up with
its competitors with its current practices.

~~~
kalleboo
How can violating someone's privacy improve their place database? Extract "I'm
waiting at <restaurant name> now" from people's iMessage chats???

Google has been connecting place names by OCRing storefronts taken with their
street view cars. Apple claim to be doing the same thing (but apparently doing
a far worse job of it)

~~~
astrange
If you look up somewhere in Google Maps and then go there, with your phone in
your pocket, Google knows where you went. It also knows how long you stayed
there.

Now they know exactly where it is, when people like to go there, and if the
opening hours seem accurate.

Not limited to them of course, this is also check-in companies' business
model, like Foursquare.

------
ksec
Out of a total 123,000 employees around the world, more than half of them
works in retail. So say we have 60,000, that includes Marketing, Supply
Chains, Sales, Management, Engineering, R&D, Finance, Legal, Design, etc.....

You are telling me they have nearly 10% of workforce works on that bloody
pieces of crap called Apple Map?

Has any one seen / uses Apple Map in Japan? South Korea? Taiwan? Hong Kong? (
Excludes China because all Data comes from Government ) Australia?

If anyone has been wondering how Apple got $9 billion Raw Profits from Google
for being default search engine and their Margin hasn't increase a bit. Here
you got the answer.

Seriously - Apple Maps after 5 years is still not good enough. And we expect
Great things from Apple. Not Good or Good enough. At least the Apple when it
was ran by Steve Jobs.

------
ummonk
It's weird how out of date data in providers like Tom Tom is. I just pulled up
the GIS data from Monterey County and it clearly has the same roads that the
new Apple Maps shows for Parkfield. (I can't check Markleeville, as Alpine
county charges a fee for their GIS data)

~~~
Mindwipe
My personal favourite was when I lived in Hackney in London, and there was a
business listing in Apple Maps (one of the few!) for a garage business that
had closed down in 1975, a year before Apple was even formed. That one was
pretty special.

------
muddi900
The post touches on one of the most important aspects of Apple Maps; it is not
a service, no matter what Apple tells its investors. It is a feature for Apple
Devices. There in lies the issue. It is not competing with Mapbox,
OpenStreetMaps, etc. because those are commercial service providers. It is
competing with Google Maps, because that is the default Maps 'feature' for
most phones sold in the world. However, Google Maps is in fact a service. Its
purpose is to generate local Ads-based revenue for Alphabet. There is no way
Apple will be able to catch up to Google, no matter how many Mechanical Turks
it throws at them.

Apple management can not make the case spending resources on a mere bullet-
point for the sale sheet of the Mac.

------
graeme
Great article discussing the achievements and the missteps of apple's new
maps.

Oddly, I found Apple's most successful effort, greenery, to be mixed. It's
really cool the data is there! But....the roads are less visible. I think they
need to increase the contrast or somehow make the roads more notable amidst
the green.

As for the locations, I was surprised to see the limits listed here. Apple
seemed supremely confident in their Techcrunch feature. And they rarely
preview stuff like this, so I had assumed they had some secret ace. But, this
looks rather limited and error filled. Optimistically they only rolled it out
to a small area to work out these kinks. But the errors O'bierne highlighted
don't seem easily solveablr....time will tell.

------
IvyMike
I wonder if Apple is artificially shortening buildings so you can see what is
behind them.

~~~
saagarjha
Seems like an odd conceit for Apple to make, particularly since they've been
pushing the accuracy of their 3D maps, and since you can easily rotate the map
in 3D to get a full view of everything. My guess is that their algorithm to
calculate the height of buildings from satellite imagery messed up.

~~~
ummonk
No, because if you view in 3D view using satellite mode, the buildings all
look the correct height, indicating that the algorithm can work correctly. It
seems to be specific to the 3D non-satellite (what they call "map") view.
Which suggests it might be an intentional design decision to try to reduce
masking. Very weird.

------
Digit-Al
It seems so wasteful to me that all these companies are sending out cars to
get streetview images of the same streets. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and god
knows who else. All that fuel and other resources wasted doing the same thing
over and over again. I know that commercial interests prevent them from
sharing their data, but damn is it wasteful.

It seems to me that if they were to pool their resources then not only could
they save money and resources, but they could get more comprehensive imagery
for less money.

------
oh_hello
Living in a neighborhood with a lot of tree cover, I have recently been very
impressed with Apple's 3d geometry lately. My area is effectively houses in
the woods. I'm amazed they have been able to extract geometry and textures
below heavy tree coverage. The foliage geometry is often rough, but the
houses, yards, decks, walkways, etc below are quite detailed. Having a little
experience with photogrammetry years ago, I'd love to know their process.

------
discordance
Guessing that the methods and output of human generated maps are used as
labelled training data that will be used to scale out when they apply ML to
other areas.

------
ryantgtg
The CPAD dataset has a huge amount of California green space. Even grassy
medians. I wonder if they started with that and then did their ground
truthing? And if they didn’t - well, they should have.

Semi-related: I’ve seen instances where Google Maps in Southern California has
the same street label typos as the CAMS dataset. And I don’t know why but I
suspect that Google might not admit that they use such a public dataset as
seed data.

------
lukas099
"And even backyard tennis courts"

I don't know a single person with a backyard tennis court, and there appear to
be 6 in a small area here. Where am I looking?

------
bufferoverflow
It's worrying that Apple actually lost some road data while adding landscape
details. Look at this image:

[https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54ff63f0e4b0bafce6932...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54ff63f0e4b0bafce6932642/t/5bdb450740ec9acdd24fc3be/1541096715989/?format=1000w)

------
shanehoban
This is how I feel about the two companies as a whole:

Apple make things look amazing and work decently.

Google make things work amazingly and look decent.

------
lifeisstillgood
What pleases me is that - obviously I suppose - this mapping is all done in
the counties near where the map developers live / work.

It's the thought that they just got in their cars and drove up to buildings
and harbours and cloverleafs and _checked_.

That bit just says a lot about ... accuracy.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Let me introduce you to OpenStreetMap...

------
basil-rash
So I recently chose to work in SF as opposed to Seattle (partially) on account
of the amount of green I saw on Apple Maps in SF as compared to Seattle. Would
have been nice to see this article before hand....

------
NDizzle
Cool, my very own Yuba City featured on the maps update. Indeed, it's pretty
nice... But I'm still more excited about being able to use Waze in Carplay
than any kind of Apple maps updates.

------
eevilspock
It has the freakin' Fire Trail we used to have to run for crew team workouts
twice a week from Strawberry Canyon to the research buildings way up in the
hills. That's kinda amazing.

------
appealallegator
In regard to the details, hardly anything could be compared to maps.me

------
bangonkeyboard
So Apple's new maps appear superficially more detailed, but are frequently
even less accurate than before.

"It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

------
mrlatinos
So... more green? I don't understand how this makes it better.

------
telltruth
TLDR; Apple has added a lot of vegetation information on map which makes maps
look more "fuller". They are also doing better 3D models of buildings in very
small area, very likely using 5000 humans in India as opposed to machine
learning like Google does.

------
PieUser
It's impressive and scary at the same time how much information Google Maps
can collect from your location data and your Google account

------
exabrial
So why doesn't Apple just give up and license something from a GIS company?
Maps has been terrible from launch.

~~~
jws
Do you mean in addition to the three pages of GIS providers listed in their
licensing section?

~~~
exabrial
Touche

------
mcphage
All I want them to add is traffic lights, so I can navigate to where I want to
go. I’ve been waiting for years.

------
ship_it
> Has Apple closed the gap with Google’s map?

.. proceed to explain how Apple Maps covers just 3.1% of the U.S.’s land area.

Sent from my iPhone

------
eugene3306
that looks like 2GIS maps

EDIT: check out this map of Dubai:
[https://2gis.ae/dubai?queryState=center%2F55.274674%2C25.197...](https://2gis.ae/dubai?queryState=center%2F55.274674%2C25.197107%2Fzoom%2F17)

Also check out its search UX. Try searching for "grocery"

------
outworlder
Now if only Apple Maps would stop sending me to Old Priest Grade when I visit
Yosemite, I'd be happy...

------
daveheq
There's really just too much map detail on this phone app... Like how much do
you really need?

~~~
DanBC
I agree. This is a pointless level of detail that provides almost no advantage
to the user.

------
vivaespanya
Cool, but as a non-American I expect those changes to roll over to my country
in 2030.

------
SamvitJ
I read this article in a very sarcastic tone. Wondering if that was
intentional.

------
GChevalier
Perhaps they simply used a U-Net?

------
puma1
I was trying to determine if this article was a joke or not.

------
gcbw2
because when I am driving I want to know which house has a law or not?

Most subtle changes I noticed on the examples on street names (e.g. "W 9th st"
to "ninth street", sans "w") are actually a downgrade.

------
Endy
Wow. They're now even less useful than an old paper map.

------
snambi
too big post

------
beders
wholesome

------
ben174
Apple is really stepping up and showing Google it has some power. When they
broke the map relationship with google in 2012 I was super skeptical, as were
many. But in a very apple-like way - it's starting to come together.

I still use Google for nav but I have a feeling Apple might win me over on
this one.

