[wtmt]

> One of the few examples I can think of however is Apple Maps. And it did get better; a lot better, some say better than Google Maps nowadays.

This depends on where (which country) you live. For all the ways Apple has been vocal about the Indian market and local production, Apple Maps literally sucks even in major cities in India. Google Maps is decades ahead and gets updated very quickly. Apple Maps cannot even find regular addresses or places.

Apple has its share of incompetencies and willful blind spots, and that shows up in specific areas often related to its services (Apple Intelligence is also a service). The organization and its people are not built for handling these effectively or quickly.

That said, I have more hope in Apple Intelligence improving quicker (at least in English, while competitors are already ahead in other languages, including several Indian languages) than I have in Apple Maps improving in India.

[AlotOfReading]

Google maps also sucked in India until a couple of engineers flew there to figure out all the idiosyncrasies of mapping/routing and spent a bunch of time implementing regionalized fixes for them. Apple expresses some very clear preferences in what regions they support well in Apple maps, which exclude most "difficult" areas.

[dcrazy]

The common wisdom is that Apple Maps works significantly better in the Bay Area than anywhere else on Earth, because the engineers file bugs they encounter on their commute.

[mandevil]

Yeah, so much of Google's moat in mapping is just the sheer amount of human time thrown at the problem of all the little regional idiosyncrasies all around the world. Getting that right is what makes it so hard.