I don't know. Just tried it on my OG Pixel. Maps loaded in about a second, and the search field activated instantly when I tapped it. So... maybe it is? Or maybe the Maps app on iOS is just slow?
On my Pixel 2, and the 1 before it, the Maps UI is sometimes weirdly jerky. Purely anecdotally, it feels like there is some blocking network IO on the main thread.
2 reasons. 1) they’ve only acknowledged doing this on iPhone 6 and later. 2) it’s slow as shit on my brand spanking new iPhone X as well. A slower phone def doesn’t help, but it’s not the primary issue here.
Whoa, really? I noticed Google Maps being slow as shit on my Galaxy S5 and thought it was just because it was an old phone. I guess getting a new phone isn't going to help then?
(I've been meaning to upgrade to a newer phone, maybe an LG V10 or V20, soon for several reasons; the S5 has been great but it's now 4 years old. But I guess Google Maps being slow isn't a valid reason any more.)
It's really strange to me, that Apple Maps is so smooth in comparison to iOS Google Maps. (Whether or not it is helpful is another question that I'm disregarding here.)
In a technical sense, both apps are displaying all the same kinds of things: satellite tiles, scalable road vectors, rotated outlined text for street names, 3D buildings if you like, etc. But Google Maps is dog-slow compared to Apple Maps at doing it.
Is efficient painting logic for a maps app on mobile a genuinely-hard problem that Apple Maps is being really clever at solving? Or is it an easy problem that Google Maps is being really stupid at solving?
It's not.