<i>It absolutely blows my mind that map products ship without street names clearly visible at all times.</i><p>I agree. The place where Google Maps and, to a slightly lesser extent, Apple Maps fall down is in labeling roads.<p>I can't count the number of times I've zoomed in on a map and it shows every little sushi joint in the neighborhood, but no street names. And no amount of zooming in or out will fix it.<p>It's similarly frustrating when Apple and Google show a highway shield instead of a street name in an urban area. Yes, lots of streets in urban areas are also state highways. But the state highway designations only appear in real life every few miles, while the street signs I'm standing under appear on every corner.<p>But the greatest sin is omission. Each month I have to render about 70,000 maps from towns and cities from the Philippines to Nova Scotia. And every month I spend three days manually placing towns and businesses that exist in no online maps.<p>And it's not just tiny towns on far away islands. I'm talking about places in Oklahoma and Arizona and even California that either don't exist, or are stupendously wrong.<p>Sometimes I fantasize about having a full-time job driving around the country fixing all of Apple Maps' faults. But somehow I suspect the pay would be terrible.
Another great article from this blog!<p>Last year's article from the same author [1] about Goggle Maps' use of photogrammetry and other building scanning techiques was, in my opinion, one of the most interesting HN submissions ever (its comment section[2] is also worth a read).<p>[1] <a href="https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat" rel="nofollow">https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653</a>
This is really neat but I don't really care about greenery when I'm using Apple Maps. Can they take a break from figuring out how to convert satellite images into green blobs and devise an algorithm to put street names <i>on the screen</i>?<p>Apple and Google maps are both worthless as maps without typing in an actual address and using navigation because they can't just show the main cross street names on the screen. It absolutely blows my mind that map products ship without street names clearly visible at all times.<p>The before/after map of downtown SF actually shows <i>less</i> useful data about the city. It no longer shows the names of Mission or Market streets. The fancy 3D representations of buildings don't help me negotiate on the ground.
The original Google Maps showed all the street names on all the streets, so you didn't have to guess.<p>Later versions of Google Maps didn't do this, so on some streets, you would have no idea what the street names were, and would have to zoom out or scroll out until you saw the name.<p>THIS is what I want fixed. I don't care about vegetation, I want to be able to see what the street names are without distracting myself on the map.
I think the author missed that the old version, and Google Maps currently, typically use green to denote certain types of public land (parks, national forest, etc.) not vegetation per se. Apple is solving a different use case by color coding by vegetation. And It's one that I think is less useful. KNowing that there is vegetation on someone else's private land isn't really that useful to me. But knowing the boundaries of a national forest is extremely useful.
This is a great write up but aweful news for us Apple users who finally thought Apple would be able to catch up with Google Maps. That is the only have part of one state and will be many years until the whole country but the promise that the new data would be near perfect made it worth the wait. Apple continues to favor manual vs automated such as news and music and in each case googles automated approach wins out. Yes Apple is backing privacy which is fine but they shouldn’t say they can offer equal or better features and also pursuing the privacy strategy. POI and Yelp has been the major issue with Apple Maps and this review shows they aren’t changing in this regard so now we have better vegetation but same POI issues. Very disappointing.
I used to live in the Cayman Islands (Grand Cayman specifically), and my issue with Apple Maps is, forget about the enhanced details being mentioned in this article, the actual landmass on the map is WRONG, and I just checked - its still wrong. Roads and roundabouts and my condo, and Camana Bay (big mixed commercial living area) apparently in the ocean. Its been like this since they introduced it.<p>Here's a side by side of West Bay, Seven Mile Beach and Boddentown, between Apple Maps on the left and Google Maps on the right.<p>I understand that its not a huge market (even though there's something like 2 million+ cruise shippers stopping every year), but man... it really makes me not trust it anywhere when the map is completely wrong, geographically speaking<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/4DaiXyp.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/4DaiXyp.png</a>
<a href="https://i.imgur.com/f5nerNY.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/f5nerNY.png</a>
I cannot fail to notice how many # of ads, notifications, various asks, pop-ups, disclaimers, endorsements, contact buttons or share buttons there are on this page compared to what we see in any other piece of content with as much detailed information.<p>The author definitely enjoys compiling these amazing essays and share this knowledge.<p>Thank you, Justin!
> And the office’s large headcount (now near 5,000) suggests some sort of manual / labor-intensive process.<p>My partner briefly worked for a human-powered 3d mapping firm; they would get satellite and plane/drone photography of a large swath of land, split it up into block-sized chunks, and then each worker would take a block and use an in-house program to model the buildings at a pretty impressive level of detail. Workers got paid per-block and blocks were priced based on their complexity. They've been doing this for over 10 years by this point, so it's not an entirely unknown or uncommon thing to handle this kind of work manually.
>In other words, TomTom’s database somehow has roads from Parkfield’s boomtown days—roads that have been gone for more than 75 years. No wonder why Apple removed them.<p>Another possible explanation is the TomTom was using these unlikely to be visited streets as trap streets.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street</a><p>>In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map who, if caught, would be unable to explain the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map as innocent. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.
Funny that the author mentions the Markleeville Courthouse as being across the street from the General Store, when it is, in fact, next door, as shown in the picture. I'm sure plenty of us on HN have cycled through Markleeville a couple of times in mid-July...<p>I've always found Google vs Apple maps discussions to be interesting, as I've always vastly preferred Apple Maps data for walking around places; Google Maps too often had poor building shapes that looked nothing like the real thing, or hid business names at the scale I was trying to use. Perhaps that's because I live in the Bay Area. When I'm overseas, in particular, I don't hesitate to go to Google Maps first.
Hilarious that they consider the job done after covering the Bay area. They are years away from doing this world wide. Most of their iphone revenue is from outside of California.<p>I used to work in Nokia in the maps division that later became Here. I still remember when Nokia disrupted a market then dominated by the likes Tom Tom and a few others by giving away the maps for free along with every phone. Initially this was a subscription service that you had to opt into. But releasing it for free changed a lot of things.<p>One of those things was Google accelerating their own maps production and terminating their licensing of Nokia's Navteq maps. It took them many years after that to catch up in terms of quality after that. They had to rely on Teleatlas (now Tom Tom) for quite some time while slowly building out their maps. This is a huge investment and a lot of work. I'd say they definitely pulled ahead only a few years ago with very decent world wide coverage for most of their feature set. Here maps is still better qualitatively in some areas but their feature set is just not great at this point and they've lost most of the consumer mind share they used to have under Nokia. They are still unrivaled for offline navigation on the road and they completely own the in car navigation market at this point (around 70-80% marketshare).<p>Apple maps inception was around 2011ish around the time their relationship with Google soured. Actually several of my former colleagues ended up working for them after the Nokia implosion. They prematurely launched the first version and they are still heavily dependent on Tom Tom's Teleatlas (again) after last year's revision which improved things considerably. The stuff in this article is nice but world coverage like this is quite far out. Also, you can bet Google will take the hint and get their hands dirty improving their algorithms. The genius with their operation is that they are really good at collecting data, so new algorithms can be applied world wide. This is where Apple is behind: they lack the data coverage that Google has been investing in for the last decade.
Lol, he's comparing the two worst map distributors details, and comparing its various mapping mistakes. I didn't see a word about the two other better maps: Microsoft and OpenStreetMap.<p>Why Microsoft? They collaborated very early with a very good mapping university institute, which invented creating 3d data from stereo images, from air photos and car-level photos (for the facades), and so on, and then offered the city and regional surveyor officed cooperation contracts. they usually gave the best GIS data of all.<p>A few years later Google came into this business by getting the rights for US satellite data, but with satellite data you are always behind. no 3d extraction possible and always 4 years behind. local airplane stereo photos are done yearly to find illegal buildings and collect taxes for them. they are done by the state and cities.<p>OpenStreetMap is crowdfunded so the level of detail is unmatched of course.<p>I coded such 3d extraction from stereo photos in the late 80ies for our local city land surveyor office. the roof details and height was much better then than today's public data in Google or Apple' maps. feature extraction was half automatic, guided with manual help.
Why does he treat the presence of fans and HVAC units on building roofs as an <i>advantage</i> for Google Maps? Isn't that just meaningless visual clutter? Unless I'm looking to land a helicopter on the roof, it's just distracting.<p>If I were working on maps at Google I'd be looking into ways to remove that sort of content, not emphasize it. Maybe that's Apple's thinking as well.
I wonder how many people missed the interesting conclusion of that article (that places, not map details, are the key when we get to augmented reality and self-driving) since it spent so much time analyzing the differences in the new map and speculating on how they did it. That stuff was cool too, but I think the author had a really good insight that most people are going to miss.
I've been finding Apple's 3D maps a spectacular success over Google's for a while. Yes, they do make it easier to find the building you're looking for. And, give visual clues about where you should be driving. Very little clutter, large fonts make it easier to see the map on your car dashboard. Well done, Apple!
On a side note I can't even imagine how big that webpage was. If you like animated gifs, boy have I got the page for you!<p>All in all, what I've learnt is how many petabytes must be involved in mapping the US and the world and the 3D aspects.
I just want a mode where I can see a list of directions without starting turn by turn navigation. I grew up in a time before turn by turn, and I do find it useful the VERY few times I'm driving in completely new locations. But most of the time I just want to see an overview of how to get to a place and then maybe when it is time to get the last 2 or 3 turns read aloud to me. But no, as soon as a choose a route my phone starts making unwanted noises and blathering about turns I need to make to get out of my driveway.
I'm using iPhone and iPad but I would never bother with Apple Map as long as it's only available in their app.<p>I have marked a lot of stars and labels for places. If these are not available on my Linux laptop or web browsers they are totally worthless.<p>I know Apple made MapKit for embedding and you can share links but it is miles away from enough. Apple has to fully open their map for browsers and even Android to make it actually useful but I doubt they will.
I remember seeing a demo of pix2pix where this was one of targeted use cases. [1]<p>There were even demos of the reverse, where you take a street map and convert it back into a plausible photorealistic satellite image. [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/" rel="nofollow">https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/</a> specifically <a href="https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/images/sat2map1_AtoB/latest_net_G_val/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/images/sat2map1_AtoB/late...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/images/map2sat1_BtoA/latest_net_G_val/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/images/map2sat1_BtoA/late...</a>
There's something really awesome about reading an in-depth report like this, especially when you can feel the enthusiasm of the author. Dope work as always.
I bought a second hand Lexus the other day.<p>Whilst Apple and Googles map display might be leagues ahead, the voice and visual navigation in the Lexus hybrids or similar feels like it’s easily decades ahead of both Apple and Google. Both in the quality of instruction given, visual cues and even the sound of the voice.<p>Which really surprised me, because the last place I expected to find the best navigation system I’d ever seen was a little closed system that hasn’t received software updates since the car was built (2013).
Off topic but map related, though people here would like a look.<p>I've been browsing this recently for Ireland
<a href="http://map.geohive.ie/mapviewer.html" rel="nofollow">http://map.geohive.ie/mapviewer.html</a><p>Really nice tool to see old maps/aerial photos overlaid with current surveys.
Photos go back 25 years and maps back to the 1800s<p>Great use of public money by Ordnance Survey Ireland to provide public access to public data.
Very interesting. Anecdotally, I've found the new Maps to be much better in its level of detail–at least from the brief time I was able to use it this summer–but from the article it looks like most of that might just be things to make the map look pretty? It seems like Apple is extracting shapes from satellite imagery to make their maps look better, but failing to include actual business and place information.
Google and Apple get all the glory - but some of you folks might find mapy.cz useful, esp when traveling abroad. Mobile app offers even offline tourist maps for the whole world, including contours -- <a href="https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=-119.7422922&y=37.8326869&z=8" rel="nofollow">https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=-119.7422922&y=37.8326869&z=...</a>
> Billions of people who can access and contribute to Google Map's place information via its website<p>This is both good and bad for Google Maps. Scammers have polluted Google Maps with bad locksmith entries: <a href="https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/78-very-quickly-to-the-drill" rel="nofollow">https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/78-very-quickly-to-the...</a>
Fantastic article (the gifs could be slower).<p>In general the article is very critical of Apple new maps, but at one point it seems to commend them for removing roads that are no longer there:<p>> <i>Notice how many of Parkfield’s roads disappear on Apple’s new map. When Apple’s vans visited, they likely saw nothing but empty fields here those roads were supposed to be (...) TomTom’s database somehow has roads from Parkfield’s boomtown days—roads that have been gone for more than 75 years. No wonder why Apple removed them.</i><p>I've never been to Parkfield but I don't think removing old roads is a good idea.<p>In the forests near Paris where I live, there are roads that were built 350 years ago and that ceased to be real "roads" about 150 years ago. Yet they are still passable by foot or on a mountain bike.<p>Some maps have them (usually, Google maps have them all) and that helps a lot when planning a bike trip for example. Some maps don't, and once you're in the middle of the forest those maps tell you there's literally no way out, which is ridiculous.
They’ve added a bunch of green areas, but there is hardly any notation of trails. Neither Google or Apple is great for trail maps in their default form, but at least Google has higher contrast trail markings with names that are occasionally readable. Apple maps are a miserable failure in this regard.
It's hard to get excited about a work that's still so much in progress. Who will be the target market and in what capacity for the final product? Or is that not to be worried about? This seems like doing something because you can, rather than a large demand for anything about it.
I think this article illustrates a critical issue with Apple's software. The stance on privacy means little machine learning can take place. Little machine learning means that Apple has to resort to more manual techniques. This, in turn, leads to the far inferior (and often dangerously incorrect) place databases and issues with their Maps application.<p>And then users will simply turn to an alternative which absolutely does not care about their privacy, undoing all of Apple's effort in protecting their users' privacy.<p>Apple needs to strike a balance between protecting users' privacy and performing analytics. Perhaps send the data off-shore to a location not under US jurisdiction, I don't know. But it is clear that Apple cannot keep up with its competitors with its current practices.
Out of a total 123,000 employees around the world, more than half of them works in retail. So say we have 60,000, that includes Marketing, Supply Chains, Sales, Management, Engineering, R&D, Finance, Legal, Design, etc.....<p>You are telling me they have nearly 10% of workforce works on that bloody pieces of crap called Apple Map?<p>Has any one seen / uses Apple Map in Japan? South Korea? Taiwan? Hong Kong? ( Excludes China because all Data comes from Government ) Australia?<p>If anyone has been wondering how Apple got $9 billion Raw Profits from Google for being default search engine and their Margin hasn't increase a bit. Here you got the answer.<p>Seriously - Apple Maps after 5 years is still not good enough. And we expect Great things from Apple. Not Good or Good enough. At least the Apple when it was ran by Steve Jobs.
It's weird how out of date data in providers like Tom Tom is. I just pulled up the GIS data from Monterey County and it clearly has the same roads that the new Apple Maps shows for Parkfield. (I can't check Markleeville, as Alpine county charges a fee for their GIS data)
The post touches on one of the most important aspects of Apple Maps; it is not a service, no matter what Apple tells its investors. It is a feature for Apple Devices. There in lies the issue. It is not competing with Mapbox, OpenStreetMaps, etc. because those are commercial service providers. It is competing with Google Maps, because that is the default Maps 'feature' for most phones sold in the world. However, Google Maps is in fact a service. Its purpose is to generate local Ads-based revenue for Alphabet. There is no way Apple will be able to catch up to Google, no matter how many Mechanical Turks it throws at them.<p>Apple management can not make the case spending resources on a mere bullet-point for the sale sheet of the Mac.
Great article discussing the achievements and the missteps of apple's new maps.<p>Oddly, I found Apple's most successful effort, greenery, to be mixed. It's really cool the data is there! But....the roads are less visible. I think they need to increase the contrast or somehow make the roads more notable amidst the green.<p>As for the locations, I was surprised to see the limits listed here. Apple seemed supremely confident in their Techcrunch feature. And they rarely preview stuff like this, so I had assumed they had some secret ace. But, this looks rather limited and error filled. Optimistically they only rolled it out to a small area to work out these kinks. But the errors O'bierne highlighted don't seem easily solveablr....time will tell.
It seems so wasteful to me that all these companies are sending out cars to get streetview images of the same streets. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and god knows who else. All that fuel and other resources wasted doing the same thing over and over again. I know that commercial interests prevent them from sharing their data, but damn is it wasteful.<p>It seems to me that if they were to pool their resources then not only could they save money and resources, but they could get more comprehensive imagery for less money.
Living in a neighborhood with a lot of tree cover, I have recently been very impressed with Apple's 3d geometry lately. My area is effectively houses in the woods. I'm amazed they have been able to extract geometry and textures below heavy tree coverage. The foliage geometry is often rough, but the houses, yards, decks, walkways, etc below are quite detailed. Having a little experience with photogrammetry years ago, I'd love to know their process.
Guessing that the methods and output of human generated maps are used as labelled training data that will be used to scale out when they apply ML to other areas.
The CPAD dataset has a huge amount of California green space. Even grassy medians. I wonder if they started with that and then did their ground truthing? And if they didn’t - well, they should have.<p>Semi-related: I’ve seen instances where Google Maps in Southern California has the same street label typos as the CAMS dataset. And I don’t know why but I suspect that Google might not admit that they use such a public dataset as seed data.
"And even backyard tennis courts"<p>I don't know a single person with a backyard tennis court, and there appear to be 6 in a small area here. Where am I looking?
It's worrying that Apple actually lost some road data while adding landscape details. Look at this image:<p><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54ff63f0e4b0bafce6932642/t/5bdb450740ec9acdd24fc3be/1541096715989/?format=1000w" rel="nofollow">https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54ff63f0e4b0bafce6932...</a>
This is how I feel about the two companies as a whole:<p>Apple make things look amazing and work decently.<p>Google make things work amazingly and look decent.
What pleases me is that - obviously I suppose - this mapping is all done in the counties near where the map developers live / work.<p>It's the thought that they just got in their cars and drove up to buildings and harbours and cloverleafs and <i>checked</i>.<p>That bit just says a lot about ... accuracy.
So I recently chose to work in SF as opposed to Seattle (partially) on account of the amount of green I saw on Apple Maps in SF as compared to Seattle. Would have been nice to see this article before hand....
Cool, my very own Yuba City featured on the maps update. Indeed, it's pretty nice... But I'm still more excited about being able to use Waze in Carplay than any kind of Apple maps updates.
It has the freakin' Fire Trail we used to have to run for crew team workouts twice a week from Strawberry Canyon to the research buildings way up in the hills. That's kinda amazing.
So Apple's new maps appear superficially more detailed, but are frequently even less accurate than before.<p>"It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
TLDR; Apple has added a lot of vegetation information on map which makes maps look more "fuller". They are also doing better 3D models of buildings in very small area, very likely using 5000 humans in India as opposed to machine learning like Google does.
> Has Apple closed the gap with Google’s map?<p>.. proceed to explain how Apple Maps covers just 3.1% of the U.S.’s land area.<p>Sent from my iPhone
that looks like 2GIS maps<p>EDIT: check out this map of Dubai: <a href="https://2gis.ae/dubai?queryState=center%2F55.274674%2C25.197107%2Fzoom%2F17" rel="nofollow">https://2gis.ae/dubai?queryState=center%2F55.274674%2C25.197...</a><p>Also check out its search UX. Try searching for "grocery"
because when I am driving I want to know which house has a law or not?<p>Most subtle changes I noticed on the examples on street names (e.g. "W 9th st" to "ninth street", sans "w") are actually a downgrade.
Apple is really stepping up and showing Google it has some power. When they broke the map relationship with google in 2012 I was super skeptical, as were many. But in a very apple-like way - it's starting to come together.<p>I still use Google for nav but I have a feeling Apple might win me over on this one.