[rphlx]

Apple could have rolled out their map-app gradually to a few hundred thousand "specially selected" beta users before totally dropping Google Maps in iOS. Given Apple's religious following - many users would have probably paid to participate. It was unnecessarily risky and basically a product-management-screwup to force-convert everyone simultaneously.

[mitchty]

They did that in the iOS 6 beta, the users were known as developers. And yes, we do pay $99/year to be able to test things like this. The forums there listed the same things people here are complaining about. It was all said on those forums, we were just under NDA not to talk about it.

Which leads me to believe this was an upper management push and they are willing to deal with the PR fallout. beta 1 maps was really really bad, gm is workable. It has improved a ton during the betas, and that was a 2 month-ish spread. I'll give Apple a few months to clean up the data, it makes Core Location way more useful than when it was tied to Googles' api. Note this is for things like the vector road parts of the map, you can basically have your location clamped to the road. Sometimes gps signals are... erratic when driving in cities, this helps things out immensely. But we'll see if it is another ping or not.