Google Maps's Moat: How Far Ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps? (justinobeirne.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the past year, we've been comparing Google Maps and Apple Maps in New York, San Francisco, and London -- but some of the biggest differences are outside of large cities. That's a comprehensive comparison. Google Maps, unlike Apple Maps, doesn't stop at outlining the routes. It offers contextual details such as depiction of buildings and other structures and vegetation. It has captured everything -- from dish antennae on top of buildings to golf courses. Furthermore, Google Maps also shows name of the neighbourhood, and has more distinguishable icons and colors. You can glance at a portion of the map on Google Maps and get a good picture of what's in that place. Apple Maps, on the other hand, looks empty. Like an unfurnished house.

Comments

OpenStreetMap

[Max_W]

I use OpenStreetMap http://www.osm.org/ . It is kind of Wikipedia approach to mapping.

By the way, I use this web application to view Wikipedia articles on the OSM map: http://ausleuchtung.ch/geo_wik... . It works for all language versions of Wikipedia, and to view hotels, supermarkets, etc. this one: http://ausleuchtung.ch/travel_...

Apple doesn't care about it's maps anyway

[DalM]

Apple's maps were only ever intended to act as an insurance policy if Steve Job's thermonuclear war with Google got Google Maps removed from the App Store. That happened for a short time, but now it's back and things have cooled significantly since 2012 on the patent war. Navigation is as much a minimum expectation of a smartphone now as email is. It was only ever developed at all to ensure there would always be maps available for the iPhone. In the event that Google removes Maps from the App Store, Apple will immediately make new, immediate, and significant investments in their program. Until then, they don't care.

Re:Depends on how many features Google takes away

[AvitarX]

It's back, but for a long while they removed the ability to download offline maps.

Another one they still don't have (I think) is search based layers, replaced most closely with the ability to search and add a waypoint to your route (I usually used it to have a gas station layer on long trips).

Offline maps came back after over a year, but I don't believe search based layers ever has.

Re:Old joke

[TheRaven64]

I haven't used Apple Maps for a while, but when they launched here it turned out that they'd bought maps from TomTom, who bought them from a company that they acquired in 1992 - and those maps hadn't been updated since. It was an interesting historical snapshot, and mostly buildings hadn't changed (a load of them have been here for the best part of 800 years, so only a few were obviously wrong), but a lot of pubs had changed names since then and so it was quite confusing.

That said, last time I was near the Google Maps HQ, I had a look at Google Maps and OpenStreetMap and found that the OSM data was better. I mostly use OSMAnd for mapping - it's open source and stores offline vector maps and does offline routing (for car, pedestrian, and bicycle). I find the Google maps difficult to read - roads are only two colours, irrespective of type, and not the standard colours for a road atlas. About the only feature that Google Maps has that I'd like is live traffic data.

I've just looked at Google Maps, and they do now have my house! I've been living here for over a year and it was built about a year before that. They don't, however, have the houses on the other three sides of the square (or, in fact, the roads for two sides). They also don't have the road that runs around the back of ours, or any of the 23 houses on those roads, or either of the blocks of flats. Oh, and the roads that they do have are in the wrong place and include a large road where there's now a block of flats, two small roads over a park, and one through someone's house. Now, compare that to OSM: They have all of the roads, house numbers for all of the houses and one of the blocks of flats, the footpath that cuts through one row of houses to the row begin, the park in the middle of the square, and the footpaths across the park. The other block is in a part that is marked as under construction, so I at least know that the map might be wrong (Google doesn't even appear to have any indication of construction work). We moved from around the corner and the Google Maps data there is weirdly wrong. It's as if they tried to draw a map by asking drunk people where things are: there are no gaps between buildings that have a driveway between them, there's a take-away at the wrong end of a row, and so on.

Some of the buildings on Google Maps are extruded, but not consistently and they don't appear to have any correlation with the heights of the buildings (three story house: flat, 1-story shop next to it: extruded).