[wnissen]

Several months after Apple Maps became the default, something like 2/3rds of all users switched away from Google Maps. It's hard for me to believe, since the Apple Maps are more attractive but still less useful, but those are the numbers. I wouldn't count on a big return to Google Search.

[saagarjha]

Most people can’t tell the difference and go with the default. Even the people who have it installed are often redirected to Apple Maps by Siri and location links since they will always use it.

[paganel]

> Most people can’t tell the difference and go with the default.

Sadly, that's true. I'm a big maps' aficionado and as such I prefer the Hybrid View (satellite + roads) whenever I'm looking for an address or POI on GMaps. I've noticed that the majority of people I interact with (work colleagues, closed ones) only use GMaps on maps view, and as such they don't know how to make sense of where exactly their desired POI is, because when they zoom in on it they usually see only some colored background with some lines (i.e. roads) on the side. While when using the Hybrid view you can actually see the buildings themselves and other physical reference points (a forest, a football field, a parking lot etc), which makes it way more easier for you when you actually want to get to said POI.

As such, I fully believe that for these types of people switching Apple Maps in place of GMaps would make no difference at all, it's just switching a blob of colored backgrounds and lines with another blob of colored backgrounds and lines, while GMaps' preeminence, IMHO, is in its exceptional and unique satellite views quality.

[deegles]

This kills me. I uninstalled Apple maps and I have to manually copy locations into Google Maps from the mail app. Clicking location links prompts me to reinstall Apple Maps. Obviously a very intentional decision.

[Chirael]

When I go to google.com with a browser other than Chrome, I see a pop-up "Switch to Chrome, a smarter browser. Google recommends using Chrome. Try it? [Yes]" Each company leverages what they have to try to push you further into their ecosystem (or as Bruce Schneier would say, further indentured to that feudal lord).

[ryukafalz]

There's a pretty significant difference though. One is a message on a company's homepage, the other is a limitation baked into the OS.

At least on Android, clicking a location link will allow you to open it in any installed application that's registered to handle it.

[dionian]

I prefer usability (UX) over content, I used to switch to other maps when I had issues with data, but there hasn't been the need to in a very long time. Default is great especially if the UX is better. Google is ok, but Apple Maps UI is the best. I still use Waze from time to time though.

[nowherecat]

I find Apple Maps annoyingly slow in calculating routes and responding to my input. Google Maps worked alright for me, but I switched to Waze a couple months ago and can't go back anymore.

Waze is superior in so many ways. It knows (most) contruction sites/road closures (there are many where I live), Waze tells me about speed traps and accidents. Maybe not the best UI, but I definitely get the best results. And I enjoy submitting Road closures etc myself - hoping that I am helping others get where they want faster/without unexpected issues. It's not perfect, but it has definitely saved me a lot of time.

[Spooky23]

IMO, Waze is hit or miss, but fun. If you're doing a multi-car road trip the little messaging/beep features and stuff are fun. It overweights traffic and underweights stop signs and lights. It's great for inter-city travel, especially if you're a little familiar with the road.

But it's subject to flights of fancy similar to MapQuest circa 2002 where you find yourself taking some strange back road to save little or no travel time.

[DigitalJack]

It does not give traffic enough weight for my commute. Waze is consistently too optimistic in travel time by 10-15 minutes (25% of my commute if I hit rush-hour).

With no traffic, it's spot on. I feel like it doesn't account for traffic that develops during the commute. Given the length of my travel, the roads may be clear when I start, but very congested before I finish.

[chrischen]

I’m suprised that info isn't built into Google Maps since Google owns Waze.

[nowherecat]

As far as I know, they are using some of the Waze data like current traffic situation to calculate travel time - my guess is that they want to keep Google Maps "uncluttered", because in comparison Waze appears pretty cluttered.

[randallsquared]

On a road trip I took in May, Waze couldn't seem to stay connected on either of two iPhones. Google Maps had no such issues. I'm not sure why that would be allowed to happen, given that Google owns Waze anyway.

[nowherecat]

Funny you mention that - this has happened a handful of times lately and I am not sure why. The network is completely lost and I have to quit and reopen the app on my iPhone for it to work again. I assumed it was due to my carriers (o2 germany) general unreliability..

[callalex]

Waze is much more of a CPU and bandwidth hog, it's quite possible your phone is just overheating and throttling especially if it is also charging st the same time and getting hit by sunlight.

[rogual]

Depends where you live. In London, Google Maps makes tube stations obvious with a big London Underground logo. Apple Maps gives them a tiny purple icon that gets lost in the noise.

[denzil_correa]

I have an awful time over the compass on Google Maps and Apple Maps on both my iPhone. I seriously don't know why. It is so adept at pointing in the exact opposite direction that I do not trust the compass anymore.

[saagarjha]

Is this just a Maps thing, or does the Compass app also give incorrect results?

[denzil_correa]

It's difficult for me to test the Compass but it is very apparent on both Apple and Google maps.

[saagarjha]

There's a built-in Compass app that you could use…

[nerdponx]

A lot of people just know Google Maps as "Maps" anyway and don't understand that it's not all the same.

[prewett]

It's possible that they liked Apple Maps better. I finally fired Google Maps and switched over to Apple Maps for turn-by-turn directions. Google Maps used to be great, and then they seemed to tell me to turn immediately when I had to turn without much forewarning. It would also say things like "in 500 feet, turn right." I have no idea how far away 500 ft is. I think Apple Maps does more of "at the next street, turn right." If I remember correctly, Google Maps has a tendency of telling me the next turn without indicating how far away it is. "At McFarlane St, turn right" as opposed to "In 1.3 mi, turn right on McFarlane St." So far, I've made a lot fewer wrong turns (or lack of turns) with Apple Maps.

Also, Google Maps has become much less good for driving, since you frequently have to zoom in quite far to see a street name. I don't know if Apple Maps is better, but I know that Google Maps used to show a lot more street names. It would be nice to have a choice about whether I see businesses and landmarks or street names, rather than making it for me.

[mulmen]

Just yesterday I gave Apple Maps another try for turn-by turn and the UX is far superior to Google Maps. Apple Maps changes perspective dynamically depending on how far away the turn is, when it is far you get an angled view that allows you to see the upcoming roads. As you approach a turn the view switches to a top-down view that makes it easier to see the layout of the intersection. When you arrive at your destination Apple also does a better job indicating which side of the street the address is on.

Google still wins on the lane awareness but that's their only advantage.

It absolutely staggers me that nobody seems to bother making sure street names are actually visible on the map. I don't know how anyone that ships navigation software without visible street names sleeps at night.

[dylan-m]

> It absolutely staggers me that nobody seems to bother making sure street names are actually visible on the map.

That's the worst thing with Google Maps for me. It drives me mad when I'm trying to navigate on foot. I never trust the compass in my phone, so figuring out my direction by looking at street names is actually pretty important. (I prefer doing that anyway, because that's just how people use maps). It's to the point where if a street actually doesn't have a name, I'll still spend a minute trying to trick Google Maps into showing one because there's no way to tell.

Does Apple do a better job with it?

[mulmen]

I didn't notice yesterday, I have been trained when using turn-by-turn to not look for street names anymore and just estimate from the highlighted route. Apple Maps appears to do a better job than Google but its still not what I would call good.

[vxNsr]

    >>Google still wins on the lane awareness but that's their only advantage.

Apparently Apple Maps is getting this in iOS11.

[PhantomGremlin]

Google Maps has become much less good for driving, since you frequently have to zoom in quite far to see a street name. I don't know if Apple Maps is better

In the past I've preferred listening to Google Maps while driving, rather than listening to Apple Maps.

I just bought a car that supports Apple Carplay. My first impression is it's pretty damn good. A nice chunk of the display is dedicated to the distance to the next turn, the name of the street to turn onto, an arrow showing the direction of the turn, etc.

Presumably "Android Carplay" or whatever Google calls it is also good. The point is that a smartphone integrated with a display screen on the dash produces a much nicer driving experience than a smartphone by iteslf.

Edit: BTW this only works well if you've entered a destination. The Carplay display of Apple Maps is total crap in terms of street names etc if just randomly driving around. Maybe that's your complaint with Google? You mean while driving around rather than navigating to a specific destination?

Perhaps I just haven't figured out how to make Apple Maps display better without entering a destination.

[Overtonwindow]

I've found Apple Maps to be absolutely awful. I like the Google UI much better, and I find its navigation, ease of use, and layout to be far superior. I would really love to make it my default.

[anthonybsd]

I don't think I've ever had an issue with Apple Maps interface. It's fairly gorgeous. It's the actual, well, maps that turned me off of it after a few weeks.

[TheOtherHobbes]

In the UK Apple Maps doesn't tell you which lane you should be in before turning. Google Maps does, which makes a huge difference when driving.

[anthonybsd]

When driving I usually use Waze, which doesn't have lane assist and prior to this I used to use a paid version of Tom Tom which did. Don't think it makes a huge difference to me either way.

[DigitalJack]

Having just traveled through the Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London, I can say with confidence that I would have appreciated lane guidance greatly for the 7 million roundabouts I went through.

I didn't know google maps did this or I would have used it. I was using Waze instead, as it's my default.

[orbifold]

The website version of google maps is pretty much unusable on an iPhone, I briefly installed the mobile version at some point, but I felt like it was less well integrated overall, so I uninstalled it.

[Spooky23]

Apple Maps is much better than it once was. They had alot of location inaccuracies, and they weight some road features differently than Google Maps. Most of the location stuff is fixed.

I made a conscious effort to use Apple Maps, Google Maps and Waze and found Apple & Google to be equivalent for routing. Sometimes the routes varied, but they were pretty solid. Waze was either super-useful time saver or a complete waste of time.

[DigitalJack]

It still has some pretty asinine behavior in search. Every time I've used it, the search suggestions will often pick something on the far side of the country or a different country altogether. It did this as recently as July for me; the last time I tried it.

I was flabbergasted when it suggested a bed and breakfast in Cape Town, South Africa, instead of the one 3 miles away by the same name. (I'm in the US)

[tssva]

My anecdotal contribution. This past spring my daughter's soccer team moved up in competition level. Instead of playing at the same field each week they now had to travel to different fields around the county each weekend. After the first couple of weeks one group of kids had gotten to each game the 30 minutes prior they were suppose to and a different group of kids arrived just in time with the parents complaining about traffic being worse than expected. After discussion on the sideline we identified that the latter group was using Apple Maps and the former Google Maps. Each time Apple Maps had directed the parents a way that would appear to be faster based upon distance and speed limits but in reality were slower because the roads in question regularly have slower traffic than the posted speed. Google Maps avoided these choke points which tells me that for some areas at least Google still has better information available or utilizes the available information better to calculate routes. The Apple Maps parents switched to using Google Maps.

[geoelectric]

I believe Google Maps uses Waze's traffic data now, so crowdsourcing keeps it very up-to-date.

[darren_]

disclaimer: I work on google maps

> Several months after Apple Maps became the default, something like 2/3rds of all users switched away from Google Maps.

When Apple Maps 'became the default', what actually happened was it outright replaced the Google-powered Maps app entirely, and there was no replacement Google-written Maps app _for_ several months. People didn't 'switch away', they were switched, you could not stay on google maps if you wanted to.

Per your numbers, 1/3rd of a platform switching back (despite having to wait months and install a new app to do so) sounds like a pretty big return to me. But I don't think there's a lot we can infer about users' propensity to set search engine defaults vs propensity to install/use apps.

[mrgordon]

Yeah totally agree. And Apple Maps was more noticeably flawed than Bing or another search competitor would be. Maps would send you to the wrong addresses over and over (especially internationally) while supposedly users may actually prefer Bing results when given both search results without branding.

[empath75]

I was in Costa Rica when they kicked google maps off the phone and the town I was in, which was reasonably well mapped on google became an unlabeled road on apple maps. I was pretty pissed about it and switched back as soon as google released a new maps app.

[hobarrera]

People switched to Google Maps because Apple Maps was absolutely awful and completely unusable.

Even today (the actually happened this morning), I type an address two blocks away and I'm shown an address in Portugal. I live in Argentina. Why it assumed I was looking for a street across the Atlantic Ocean rather than one within walking distance is beyond me (also, the street name did not match).

This also happens if I tap on a contact's address -- even though the contacts app shows the minimap with the right location.

[david-cako]

Only because it's my only choice as an Apple Watch owner. Same goes for the default Music app.

If you want the convenience of Apple Watch, Siri, or CarPlay, you are stuck using Apple Maps. It's a shame, because I love my Apple Watch for two main reasons: being able to control music and navigation in the car. My 2015 GTI was one year prior to VW's introduction of CarPlay, and this damn watch gets me about 80% of the way there without a $2k retrofit.

If I know where I'm going before I get in my car, it's Google Maps for me. More POIs, fewer outdated addresses or incorrect business hours, and better traffic negotiation.

[fenwick67]

Even if they only missed a third of users, it would easily still be worth the $3B to Google.

[jsz0]

Apple Maps was never as bad as the media hype suggested at the time. It wouldn't surprise me if 2/3rds of users never encountered any major problems. While it was worse than Google Maps it was still as good or better than most automaker nav and portable units people were accustomed to using.

[dragonwriter]

> Apple Maps was never as bad as the media hype suggested at the time.

I used it briefly at the time and it was worse than the media hype suggested, in the worst case routing me back and forth across most of the North-South axis of California for a cross-town trip.

> While it was worse than Google Maps it was still as good or better than most automaker nav and portable units people were accustomed to using.

Even with a map database that is now a decade out of date, my Prius's onboard nav has never given me the kind of problems Apple Maps did in my brief period of using it, and its had far more opportunity.

[muninn_]

I'm one of those people. For me it's about privacy, and that Apple Maps is just good enough. In my daily use I found that Google and Apple both screwed me up in the same ways (not nothing a road was closed, etc...). Google Maps is probably better overall, but I'm just speaking from my experience.

[Nerdfest]

Seems to me that Google has a better privacy record than Apple. Both companies get all sorts of data about their users, but Apple has had some serious data breaches.

[Mister_Snuggles]

Do you have any examples of these? Were they a case of Apple as a whole getting breached (e.g., all hashed iCloud passwords) or individual accounts?

I use Apple services for quite a few things, so whenever I hear about a data breach I evaluate how I use the service and how I can guard against similar breaches that might affect my data.

EDIT: I should point out that this applies to other services that I use as well. This is something everyone who relies on a 3rd party service should keep an eye on as a matter of course.

[macintux]

I don't remember ever hearing of an Apple data breach. Certainly some of the celebrity photo hacks were initially attributed to a general iCloud security problem, but were later found to be typical password problems.

[stephenr]

What are you talking about?

Even if Apple had data breaches that it was responsible for (you do know that the celebrity titty-shot photos were all social-engineered/re-used passwords right? None were actually iCloud breaches), that isn't about privacy, that's about security.

Google literally builds profiles about it's products (the eyeballs looking at *.google.com) to better place ads in front of said eyeballs, because that's how they make 90% of their money.

Apple does everything it can to anonymise what data it does need to see: there's no sign-in for maps, it reset's it's random identifier periodically, and each route is split into multiple segments.