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Apple Will Use Drones To Improve the Quality of Apple Maps (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple plans to use drones and new indoor navigation features to improve its Maps service and catch longtime leader Google (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternate link), according to people familiar with the matter. The Cupertino, California-based company is assembling a team of robotics and data-collection experts that will use drones to capture and update map information faster than its existing fleet of camera-and-sensor ladened minivans, one of the people said. Apple wants to fly drones around to do things like examine street signs, track changes to roads and monitor if areas are under construction, the person said. The data collected would be sent to Apple teams that rapidly update the Maps app to provide fresh information to users, the person added. Apple is also developing new features for Maps, including views inside buildings and improvements to car navigation, another person familiar with the efforts said. Apple filed for an exemption on Sept. 21, 2015, from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly drones for commercial purposes, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg News. At that time, exemptions were required to commercially operate drones. In a response dated March 22, 2016, the FAA granted Apple approval to "operate an unmanned aircraft system to conduct data collection, photography, and videography," according to one of the documents. Apple's application told the FAA that it would use a range of drones sold by companies such as SZ DJI Technology Co. and Aibotix GmbH to collect the data. Apple has hired at least one person from Amazon's Prime Air division to help run the drone team, one of the people said.
They don't have the engineering talent to catch up to Google's lead on maps or siri or anything else that doesn't involve making thinner phones.
... hundreds of millions of phones which act as sensors and they need some drones???
over-paid executives are idiots
Doesn't Apple need to develop it's own line of drones first?
NIH is deeply entrenched in Apple culture.
*Ahem*! They prefer to be called "cartographers".
... will they need?
There are construction projects going on all over hell's half an acre at any one given time.
Apple needs to do R&D on their core products. They have way too much cash to be re-inventing the wheel.
This sounds like the cluster-fuck Microsoft is having with smart phones -- too late to the party and they didn't even bring the ice.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
They don't have the engineering talent to catch up to Google's lead on maps
Apple maps at the outset did not have as good base data as Google. But even then it gave better directions than Google did - it directed me to my house via the route I already drove already because I knew it was the bast (that's the best way to judge map apps, but asking for directions for places you already know well and seeing if you agree).
Nowadays Apple maps data is every bit as good as Google has, and I would say they repair errors found much faster than Google. The past five incidents I've reported (bad roads or wrong information about places) I received a notification that the errors had been corrected in a day or two.
Apple also has surpassed Google in transit directions, offering directions that include how to go through the station...
Google may have started a lot earlier but you are totally forgetting the funk and lethargy that large organizations fall into over time. Apple has a very different corporate structure that is letting the Apple Maps team advance much faster than Google has been improving...
Apple may not be ahead with Siri but I don't think they are that far behind either. What makes you think Google has engineering chops no-one else does? The massive successes of Google Plus or Hangouts?? They are both pretty much at the start of a very, very long race there and it is anyone's game...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Uh huh. Sure.
The drone isn't going to help with the problems Apple Maps has. The map data is fairly complete these days. Its problems are:
1. Search
2. Traffic
3. Directions
Searching for locations works the majority of the time. But it's still not uncommon to get results randomly across the country, if not in another country entirely.
Traffic in iOS 10 is much improved: it now has some basis in reality. Not generally the current reality, but maybe as recently as 12 hours ago.
Directions are worthless in iOS. Despite knowing where an address is, despite knowing all the roads between the start and finish, Apple Maps will still send you someplace else. Usually it gets the route right (even if it's based on traffic from yesterday), but sometimes - sometimes it just sends you somewhere else.
And no amount of drones is going to fix any of that. Well, I suppose they could use drones to improve the traffic reports. But that's not what they're planning on doing.
if a drone came in your yard without an invite could you keep it for dissection and experiments?
..and by drones it means the user base....
I'm in a major North American city and Google maps has almost no data on the construction in town. Some of it weeks after it began.
I also don't trust Google maps for traffic. They seem to mark a route "Red" as heavy traffic faster than Apple maps, to the point that I ignore their statements on traffic density... the roads are usually not as bad as they say they are.
Apple maps are quicker to read, faster to load, give me better traffic. OpenStreetmap gives me better detail on streets, walking paths, geography and cycling paths. Google maps are better than all of these at finding addresses, and nobody has anything better than Google Streetview.
We can't forget that Apple is making money, and a lot of money, selling phones. You're paying for that mapping sofware. Google is an advertising company, they make money selling your location and other information about you. The privacy reasons keep my feet out of Google as much as possible, but the alternatives have advantages.
It's not the quality of the maps that makes Google better than Apple. It's the simple matter of understanding that context-sensitive searches are essential to a good "map experience". If you search on Google Maps for a place, business, or business type; you get results for that immediate area. On Apple Maps, the search returned could be on the other side of the planet, as I found out, searching for "soup dumplings" in the middle of Chinatown, San Francisco. Apple Maps returned a location in Taiwan. Google Maps returned a place around the corner.
My UID is prime!
Searching for locations works the majority of the time. But it's still not uncommon to get results randomly across the country
That happens sometimes but it also happens in Google Maps.
Apple maps is still better for searching though. Try a search for "Arby's" - Apple maps zooms out to a view at city scale with the map taking up 3/4 of the screen, he two closest results in text at the bottom. Google maps zooms out to city scale too, but in a map that takes up the top 1/5 of the screen, basically unreadable - then has a list of arbors with distances and addresses, but you can't really tell which ones are nearby or which directions the ones on the list are unless you are familiar with the app...
Apple Maps traffic in Denver seems every bit as good as Google maps. Both are inferior to Waze though, which is pretty amusing since Waze is owned by Google...
I've never had an issue with Apple Maps giving me bad directions, across most the the US. (I've driven coast to coast).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's the difference between Apple and Google. Apple respect users privacy.