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.

Comments

Bye Apple

[heptapod]

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.

Re:Bye Apple

[ArcherB]

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.

I agree that that map app is flawed, but first releases of anything usually is. I have no doubt that this will be fixed in short order as Apple has gobs of money to throw at the problem and knowledge of where the problems are.

There is no better beta test than a general release.

Disclaimer: I am an Android user and by no means an Apple fanboi. Frankly, I despise the company for abusing the court system for their anticompetitive practices. However, you have to give Apple credit here for admitting flaws. It's not something the company often does and they should get credit for it.

Re:Bye Apple

[clonehappy]

Tim Cook goofed.

Because he's not a lying egomaniac? I hope you were being sarcastic, but you can never be too sure.

I appreciate his honesty and willingness to be forthcoming about a flaw in their product.

Re:Bye Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about it being fixed in "short order". Think of how long it took and how many people it took to get Google Maps to the level it's at. Even if Apple spends enough to cut that time in half we're still looking at a decent wait.

Re:Bye Apple

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

as someone who bought apple shares before 2007 - i can only hope that fucking up then throwing money at problems to fix them carelessly is not the long term post steve jobs plan.

Given the reports that they still had another year worth of contractually available Google Maps, if they wanted it, the early switch does seem like a questionable move; but the 'throwing money at the problem' part is simply an inevitability if they want to get into mapping.

As they've learned(and any GIS people could have told them ahead of time...) the state of computerized mapping is such that you can't just throw a small number of talented programmers at the problem and expect it to work. Apple can do UIs, and the math behind various projections and coordinate systems and other cartographic stuff is available; but the underlying data about the real world are absolutely filthy and often patchy, outdated, scattered between multiple entities, etc, etc. They can either drop the product, or commit themselves to a long string of purchases of existing datasets and talent, and quite possibly a bunch of sheer slogging. Team Google doesn't have all those wacky spy cars running around purely for their novelty value, or because they have some moral objection to developing software to grovel through 3rd-party datasets...

You can debate whether it is a problem worth throwing money at; but it is a problem that you either don't touch, approach cautiously and with a willingness to take it slowly(ie. openstreetmap), or go in with checkbook blazing.

Re:Bye Apple

[sycodon]

To paraphrase the AC.

I don't think Steve would have allowed such as shitty product to completely be release.

This is probably the beginning of many such goofs as Apple ceases to be Apple and becomes just another giant technology company.

Steve was the nuclear fire that drove Apple. With the fire out, like a White Dwarf star, Apple will now simply fade away in the coming decades.

Sad.

Re:Bye Apple

[JDG1980]

I agree that that map app is flawed, but first releases of anything usually is.

That's acceptable if you're doing something really new and innovative that no one has done before – like the original iPhone itself, or the first release of Siri. On the other hand, if you're entering an existing marketplace, your first release had better be at least as good as the entrenched players, preferably better, or at least offer some substantial other benefit to offset that. (This is why I think Windows Phone 8 is going to be a massive flop.)

This goes double if you're replacing functionality in an existing product. You can't replace a fully-working utility with a buggy beta and expect users not to complain loudly.

There is no better beta test than a general release.

Using customers as beta testers is a sadly common practice in the IT industry, but one reason why Apple has been so popular with users is that they've avoided doing this – up until now.

Re:Bye Apple

[interval1066]

Agreed. Apple is so keen to cut their tether to Google they cut the customer's throats, "Kudos" to Apple for admitting they're wrong? Please...

Re:Bye Apple

[pr0nbot]

They're probably sitting on enough cash to move towns and rivers to match their maps.

Re:Bye Apple

[m.ducharme]

Apple's been doing this with (some of) their software titles for years. This is nothing new to them at all. The only thing that's new is that expectations are higher for Apple now, and they can't release a product without the eyes of the world scrutinizing every tiny thing they do.

Everyone's making a big deal about Apple Map software, but nobody seems to remember that Safari, iTunes, and a half-dozen other Apple applications are steaming piles of shit, and that to make a proper operating system, they had to buy one that was based on BSD. This isn't about Apple adopting a bad software dev strategy, it's about Apple's bad software dev strategy biting them in the ass for the first time.*

*Disclosure and notice to the flame-warriors: I say these terrible things about Apple not because I'm an Apple hater, but because I've been using Apple products almost exclusively for many years now, and have much experience with Apple's flaws as well as its finer qualities.

Re:Bye Apple

[rhsanborn]

This is absolutely not true. Jobs released a lot of dogs, and a lot of dogs that weren't ready. iCloud? Ping? iPhone 4 antenna? Please take off the rose colored glasses. This was a failure by Apple, absolutely. But let's not hearken to the good old days where no wrongs were made. They never existed.

Re:Bye Apple

[Ash-Fox]

What happened to "It Just Works"?

It's now become "It Just Sues!".

Re:Bye Apple

[R3d M3rcury]

Apple has never had free navigation so even a crappy app is better than what they had before.

No, it isn't.

Look, you can throw in all the 3D spinny effects/voice activation/turn-by-turn/traffic you want. If I say I want to go from point A to point B and the app comes back and says, "Sorry, I can't find point B," it is not better than what I had before.

Like the Samsung commercial, Apple users are saying, "we'll get that fixed next time."

The fanbois will always say that. These are people that you will not get, no matter what. 5% of the world are Apple lovers. 5% of the world are Apple haters. The other 90% fall somewhere in-between.

Apple will survive and do quite well with their 5%. The problem is that to thrive and grow, Apple needs those other 90%. These aren't the people who say, "Look at the shiny Apple!" They expect things to "just work." When they don't, they'll look for something that does.

Steve Jobs wouldn't apologize

[Anonymous Coward]

He'd just say you were trying to navigate wrong.

Re:Steve Jobs wouldn't apologize

[mrquagmire]

"Our maps aren't inaccurate. Your towns are inaccurate."

Really bad in Canada

[jest3r]

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)

Re:Really bad in Canada

[jest3r]

I agree the actual map data they have is really lacking.

However it's not hard to find good source data either. Almost 30% of my searches resulted int he location simply being "not found". These missing towns for example are on every map I have ever seen. It shouldn't be up to iPhone users to add towns onto a map - that is base location data that should be there from the start. Users can refine pin locations and add points of interests. But towns and cities should all be there as they have existed in real life since the 1800's or earlier.

You would think Apple would have audited the map data from their suppliers and realized that the maps themselves are sub-par.

Failure in reporting

[Andy Dodd]

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/

Re:It really is the House of Steve

[Overzeetop]

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.