[deergomoo]

While the maps themselves are excellent, it's a shame you lose out on Google's frankly ridiculous business data. I've had Apple Maps route me to a café that was temporarily closed, while Google Maps knew it was closed, for example.

I find I prefer to use Apple Maps for driving because it's just a nicer experience (though that's largely due to having hooks in iOS that Google Maps is not allowed), but I still don't really trust it when walking around a city. I'm in the UK so I'm not sure if it's better in the US, but it's not there yet over here.

[pfranz]

In my experience, Covid has screwed up everybody's data. Apple seems to pull from Foursquare or Yelp or something, but I've seen Google, Apple, Foursquare and Yelp all of the different, incorrect hours. I think some of them have added flags/fields for temporary hours because of it.

Apple and Yelp seem to make it really easy to give them new hours. You can either write them in or just take a photo of the hours and they'll do it. For Apple, you get an alert in about a week that the changes were posted.

Years ago, I noticed Yelp wasn't used much internationally. The well rated-places were often touristy. With Apple, I have noticed "food" won't have many good results in some countries. I feel like the same applies to Google, but since I don't primarily use it I'm not sure its fair to say that.

[webmobdev]

> it's a shame you lose out on Google's frankly ridiculous business data

In India, Apple Maps has compensated for this - they have purchased this data from JustDial.com ... However, Apple Maps still remains inferior to both Google Maps and HERE Maps due to lack of data. It's a Catch-22 for Apple as even if people want to use Apple Maps its poor user experience forces users back to its better competitor and without the users using it, it cannot improve itself. Google Maps is nearly unbeatable in India due to the sheer amount of data it collects every single day from Android Phones and "crowdsourcing" from its users has made it really good at routing - for e.g. in Bangalore's insane traffic, its algorithm is quite good in considering both shortest popular routes + traffic to suggest routes that will take the shortest time to reach a destination. HERE maps is quite good too and is quite popular in India because it allows its maps to be downloaded for offline use. (Google was forced to add this feature too. Apple Maps in India still doesn't have this feature).

[reaperducer]

I've had Apple Maps route me to a café that was temporarily closed, while Google Maps knew it was closed, for example

Both Apple and Google rely heavily on the business owners to self-report their hours.

In my company, we have one of our social media people assigned to this task. Each week he has to check all of our locations on both platforms to make sure the hours being displayed are correct.

Usually they are. Sometimes people will report a location closed because they're just mad about customer service, and he has to change it back. Sometimes our hours will change, and after he's changed them on Apple or Google, the hours will mysteriously revert to the old hours a week later.

The problem you encountered is a mindshare problem. Small businesses like cafes, and even some very large businesses, think Google=Internet. So they only update their information on Google.

COVID made this a lot worse because business owners closing their stores either temporarily or permanently don't really care that much about notifying Google or Apple. They have much more important things to worry about.

[chedabob]

I think Google's correction workflow helps massively with keeping the data up to date.

I can submit a correction for a misplaced business or wrong opening hours, and it's live on the map within hours, but more often minutes. Recently I had to submit a correction to a typo in a business name to Apple Maps and it took over a week.