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Apple CEO Tim Cook Apologizes For Maps App, Recommends Alternatives
TheBoat writes "Tim Cook has apologized for the company's Maps app in iOS 6. 'We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.' Cook said the company is continuing to work on the app, but recommended several alternatives in the meantime: apps from Bing, MapQuest, and Waze, or the map websites of Google and Nokia."
This is unusual for Apple, but not unprecedented. Steve Jobs acknowledged reception issues with the iPhone 4 in 2010, but he wasn't quite so contrite about it.
Steve Jobs would have never apologized. He woudl've given it just the right spin that everyone would feel contrite over making jokes at Apple's expense. The next release would be perfect, as Steve would have demanded, and the kerfuffle would be consigned to largely forgotten history.
Tim Cook goofed.
He'd just say you were trying to navigate wrong.
In an effort to figure out how innacurate the data in my area is I did the following:
- Fired up Xcode
- Determined that Apple Maps uses the CLGeocoder Class by peeking at the iPhone's debug console in Xcode while doing live searches in Apple Maps
- Scraped an official list of towns and cities in the province of Ontario from the provincial governments website.
- Coded up something quick in Xcode to get the results of a couple thousand searches. Searches always included the province name to be more specific.
- Ran a quick analysis of the results - not perfect but enough to get a perspective on the matter.
This is what I found:
- 2028 cities and towns searched
- 688 are not even on the map! Error Code 8
- 551 are clearly incorrect (wrong country, street names that are similar to town names etc.)
- 389 were close but not good enough (for example turn-by-turn might send you off a bridge but you'll get rescued close to where you want to be)
- Only about 400 results were actually correct.
Actual results data here and methodology here for those interested: http://www.mtonic.com/applemaps/
(It's not perfect but gives you an idea of how bad it really is in Ontario Canada anyways)
He would have just told us all that we are using the maps wrong, and we'd all apologize to him.
Steve Jobs must be turning in his grave. It sounds like Mr. Cook failed to learn from Mr. Job's demand for perfection before release. I guess this could be like iPhone v1 not having the copy and paste feature at product launch. Eventually, I wonder if people will get sick of dealing with this kind of attitude from Apple? I did - a long time ago.
Steve Jobs never would have apologized. While he was certainly one to recognize errors and correct them expeditiously, he'd never own up to it in public. His sometimes boisterous show of unwillingness to compromise is partly what has created Apple's entire image as a "no compromise" company.
Tim Cook is certainly a different guy, with a different approach. I feel he has somehow cheapened the iGadgets with this move - first by releasing a product that never should have made it through validation, and second by apologizing for it in public.
Ha I knew Apple would blame then end user for everything and spin it as just another fea... wait what?
This is actually quite a dramatic about face from the usual way Apple deals with problems. Where's the blame, then the spin, and instead of an apology I was expecting Tim Cook holding up a competitor's product going "see it has problems too!"
I'm impressed.
Good job driving ad traffic to BGR, who didn't even bother to link to the original source:
http://www.apple.com/letter-from-tim-cook-on-maps/
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
plenty of crap released under steve jobs
If you're a football fan, I'd compare Steve Jobs & Apple to Peyton Manning & the Indianapolis Colts.
The Colts were built around Manning, and when the team was all there, it worked perfectly. However, with Manning gone, they couldn't play the way they were designed to. Both the offense & defense were picked to complement Manning, and with any other quarterback, they are a poor team.
I'd say the same with Apple. I think Cook can be a great change for Apple, but the team that has been built has been built for another quarterback. Either Cook needs to act like Jobs (which I think is a bad idea) or Cook needs to change the mindset and likely many of the staff at Apple.
Either they keep going the same way or make a drastic shift, they can't work on a middle ground.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Just because it doesn't have a building exactly there doesn't mean it isn't valid to search for it. There is a 300 block on E 15th street, and searching for 315 on any mapping app other than iOS 6 maps will at least take you to a location interpolated between the two nearest real buildings on the odd side of the street.
In this case, looking at the maps, it's a public park. It's perfectly valid to reference the park as "3xx E 15th street" where xx is odd. If you search for this, you should get some point along the street on the edge of the park.
Also, someone could be searching for a valid address and typo the number. Easy to do - Any SANE mapping app will degrade gracefully in this case and take you to a location that's within visual range of your actual desired destination. Only iOS 6 maps won't.
iOS 6 maps is the only one that will take you to A COMPLETELY WRONG ROAD.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
No, the plan was never "no google maps on iOS" the plan was "we need turn-by-turn navigation in iOS and our existing deal with Google does not enable that and we can't agree on licensing terms so we will have to roll our own".
There's no conspiracy to exorcise Google from iOS - they still have several apps on iOS, it's just that the native maps app is no longer one of them (an app written by Apple in the first place).
You've always been able to use google maps from Safari (or make an icon for it so you can launch it like an app), and many people did it this way because it had more features then the built in app which hadn't been updated in a long time. The same thing was true of Youtube - the version provided by Google on the web was better than the built in one (which Apple wrote back in 2007 and didn't see the need to update for this reason).
Maybe because it doesn't run on iOS6 and is many years old and has less function than using Google maps in the browser?
Just a (well known, well reported) thought.
No one outside the IT industry cares about the boundary between OS and applications. That's purely inside baseball. End users want their product to work in a user-friendly, integrated fashion.
The idea that Steve Jobs never apologized for anything seems to be starting to become a common Slashdot misconception.
I'm sure people can think of times when they wish he did apologize for something, but to say he never did would be inaccurate.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Yes, but when it was Steve's crap it was a stunning shade of UPS brown, shined like the top of the Chrysler building, and the smell was described as "earthy and inviting, like a forest floor on a spring morning" by all the bloggers.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I think what we (the consumers and people concerned with lock-in) should be pushing for is the ability to go back to older versions of iOS on devices that we own. If every story about this failure mentioned that people who try the new version are locked in without the ability to go back to a working version, maybe Apple would cave.
The first apology is for selling too much too quickly.
The second apology is for lowering the price of the their product.
This is like when in an interview, the interviewer asks "What are your weakness", you say "Sometimes I work too hard".
Lets just ignore the fact that 75% of Android phones are on versions of Android that are (almost) 2 years old.
But hey, fuck Apple! Right?
Just because it doesn't have a building exactly there doesn't mean it isn't valid to search for it.
In which case Apple still finds it.
The Motorola ad was complete fabrication. But outright lies are OK as long as it's funny!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple does show you a location which can be accurately described 315 E 15th- elsewhere in the city, on a different 15th Street. This location most closely matches the search term in that there is actually a building numbered 315 there, it just isn't in Manhattan.
If you force it to look only in Manhattan by searching for "315 E 15th St Manhattan", it does interpolate the building numbers as you describe and returns a location in the park.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/27/googles-ilost-motorola-ad-faked-an-address-to-lose-ios-6-maps
They have had this for a while, it's not the same, but it's better than you make it sound. http://www.google.com/mobile/maps/3d/
-]Phreak Out[-
Apple iPhone users have no idea what they're talking about.
Fixing a buggy application can be done in a point release of software. The app is irrelevant, everybody, their dog and their dog's fleas have map reading software. What they don't have is good data. Why? It's expensive.
Fixing terabytes to petabytes of poor data is an entirely different matter from upgrading a map reading application. There are really only 2 companies with good data. Google and Nokia. Both have been buying, assembling, collecting POI data and updating and fixing base map data for years.
To fix this Apple are probably going to have to spend a fortune on large amounts of data, infrastructure to handle it, thousands of people to manage and check it. Both, expensive and slow. Then there's the weird melting 3D world that's going to have to change entirely. They'll have to decide if it's worth doing it properly or if they still think they can do it on the cheap.
Looking at what they have right now, it absolutely will not be "fixed next time".
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