Google Set to Release iOS Maps App Tonight

That's very good of Google to release the new maps app before the end of the holiday shopping season. If I were an Android executive at Google, I'd be fuming that they're providing a workaround to the broken software of their biggest competitor going into such an important season for selling phones.

How do Google get their apps like this approved? Indie developers get rejected all the time for replicating a function that an apple app already does, but google has chrome and others and now maps?<p>If Apple want to distance themselves from Google, surely they could just not approve any of their apps.

Curious whether it'll actually have the voice nav, which was (apparently? allegedly?) at issue in the first place.<p>I guess we will (might?) find out soon enough.

The article was kind of confusing to me..<p>Does "release" in this case mean they are going to push the button to allow users to download it from the app store tonight? Or have they just submitted it and they are awaiting approval?

The app appears to now be available on US iTunes: <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-maps/id585027354" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-maps/id585027354</a>

Have iOS6 users been waiting this long to get GMaps back?? Given the blowout, why on earth didn't Apple give special approval to GMaps and push the existing version back into the App Store?

I wonder how many developers will do that block of code that opens web links in Chrome if its available on your phone.

Now that it s out,it will be interesting to have some side to side comparison of data accuracy and additionally on Data usage between the 2 apps. The previous iOS 5 apps was using image tiling but these new app seems to use the vector based one, so in a way similar to what Apple maps s doing.

Yeah suure, "Google to release Maps tonight". More like: "Apple to approve Maps tonight".<p>Google submitted Maps to Apple months ago (although Eric Schmidt remained voluntarily ambiguous and avoided to say it explicitly): <a href="http://9to5mac.com/2012/09/25/eric-schmidt-on-google-maps-on-ios-we-think-it-would-have-been-better-if-they-had-kept-ours-but-what-do-i-know/" rel="nofollow">http://9to5mac.com/2012/09/25/eric-schmidt-on-google-maps-on...</a> After firing the iOS Maps manager (Rich Williamson), Apple decided to take the only sensible approach of finally pushing a button to let Google Maps in the app store, as a short-term stop-gap solution to end their endusers' frustration.

<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-maps/id585027354?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-maps/id585027354?mt=8</a>

Still no bike maps on iPhone.