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Apple has taken good stances on most privacy issues, but Apple Maps is poorly run. The main failure is not having something akin to a Google Scout, whereby iOS

Apple has taken good stances on most privacy issues, but Apple Maps is poorly run. The main failure is not having something akin to a Google Scout, whereby iOS users could submit info about businesses and streets that lack data. Apple instead hires a ton of contractors in Austin (and now India) to manually trace roads and guess business hours based on anonymized GPS traces. Apple lacks the scale of Google's army of unpaid Google Scouts (though they could easily fix this) and is wasting time on minutia rather than task their staff/contractors with sourcing & importing higher quality data regularly. One example would be importing county shapefiles, Apple could easily vault ahead of Google Maps if they diffed their map against each of the thousands of county maps in the USA, and they would be the only one regularly doing this (OSM does this occasionally, but not often). They could also scrape business data from each state and use that to produce more accurate & detailed business listings than Google, among many other low hanging fruit.

jdminhbg 7y ago
> The main failure is not having something akin to a Google Scout, whereby iOS users could submit info about businesses and streets that lack data. They weren't able to do this while they were still reliant on third-party data, because the contracts required them to submit those changes to the third-party providers first and then once they were accepted, get them in downstream updates. This is one of the main reasons they invested in building out their own data; they'll be able to accept user-sourced fixes much more quickly.
givinguflac 7y ago
There’s an easy way for users to submit feedback/fixes to Apple maps, I used to do it all the time. The best (?) part is they’ll notify you on your device when the issue is fixed, typically in a day or two. Nowadays the only time I’ve submitted a fix is in a really small town no one goes to.
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  There’s an easy way for users to submit feedback/fixes to Apple maps Which is? If I say "Hey Siri, how do I report an error with your navigation?" I get search results for how to report problems with Google Maps. And I definitely don't see any UI widgets that suggest that they're for reporting problems.
  - dizzydot 7y ago
    Click the information button "i" and then "Report an Issue".
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      Click the information button "i" and then "Report an Issue". There is no "i" button from the navigation screen and there's no "i" button from the search results either if you want to report entirely irrelevant results.
      - ilikehurdles 7y ago
        > There is no "i" button from the navigation screen This is likely an intentional design decision, and it sounds like a common-sense safety feature. > there's no "i" button from the search results either if you want to report entirely irrelevant results. You can hit the (i) after you make the problematic search.
        inferiorhuman 7y ago
        This is likely an intentional design decision, and it sounds like a common-sense safety feature. Great feature for walking and public transit directions. They still have interactive bits for the driving directions — I can't imagine what sort of "common sense" simply hides the report a problem thing until you dig through a few levels of mediocre UI.
dangus 7y ago
This is not 100% true, if you go to an existing business listing and scroll to the bottom there's a "report an issue" option. Apple has fixed my reported issues within a few days in the past. In another sense I'm not sure why it should matter to the end user how many interns Apple hires to do things behind the scenes. I'm imagining that Apple is well aware of these shortcomings. Not only that I wonder if operational information observations like this quickly become outdated. i.e. it's all manual and terrible until somebody gets around to automating it.
- metildaa 7y ago
  These user reports take weeks to months to get triaged, making many rather useless.
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    >> Apple has fixed my reported issues within a few days in the past. > These user reports take weeks to months to get triaged, making many rather useless. My experience is closer to the "a few days" as well; they were faster than the one time I remember reporting something to Google Maps. YMMV and all that, but.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    They all have that problem. My son's school is in a kafka-ish situation with Google where their listing is wrong and cannot be changed. People cannot write reviews, and data doesn't get updated. 98/100 times, updates to Apple or Google mapping products are done in hours or days. The 2/100, forget it.
    - metildaa 7y ago
      Apple Maps has a deep queue for reports about map inaccuracies, your minimum wait time is a few days 98 times out of 100. This is fixable, but it requires even more staffing than Apple already has working on Apple Maps (which is most of the people they employ in Austin and India).
  - deleted 7y ago
__jal 7y ago
On the other hand, Google has a growing problem with map spam precisely because they accept user submissions. Choose your poison.

jdminhbg 7y ago

> The main failure is not having something akin to a Google Scout, whereby iOS users could submit info about businesses and streets that lack data. They weren't able to do this while they were still reliant on third-party data, because the contracts required them to submit those changes to the third-party providers first and then once they were accepted, get them in downstream updates. This is one of the main reasons they invested in building out their own data; they'll be able to accept user-sourced fixes much more quickly.

givinguflac 7y ago

There’s an easy way for users to submit feedback/fixes to Apple maps, I used to do it all the time. The best (?) part is they’ll notify you on your device when the issue is fixed, typically in a day or two. Nowadays the only time I’ve submitted a fix is in a really small town no one goes to.

inferiorhuman 7y ago
There’s an easy way for users to submit feedback/fixes to Apple maps Which is? If I say "Hey Siri, how do I report an error with your navigation?" I get search results for how to report problems with Google Maps. And I definitely don't see any UI widgets that suggest that they're for reporting problems.
- dizzydot 7y ago
  Click the information button "i" and then "Report an Issue".
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    Click the information button "i" and then "Report an Issue". There is no "i" button from the navigation screen and there's no "i" button from the search results either if you want to report entirely irrelevant results.
    - ilikehurdles 7y ago
      > There is no "i" button from the navigation screen This is likely an intentional design decision, and it sounds like a common-sense safety feature. > there's no "i" button from the search results either if you want to report entirely irrelevant results. You can hit the (i) after you make the problematic search.
      - inferiorhuman 7y ago
        This is likely an intentional design decision, and it sounds like a common-sense safety feature. Great feature for walking and public transit directions. They still have interactive bits for the driving directions — I can't imagine what sort of "common sense" simply hides the report a problem thing until you dig through a few levels of mediocre UI.

dangus 7y ago

This is not 100% true, if you go to an existing business listing and scroll to the bottom there's a "report an issue" option. Apple has fixed my reported issues within a few days in the past. In another sense I'm not sure why it should matter to the end user how many interns Apple hires to do things behind the scenes. I'm imagining that Apple is well aware of these shortcomings. Not only that I wonder if operational information observations like this quickly become outdated. i.e. it's all manual and terrible until somebody gets around to automating it.

metildaa 7y ago
These user reports take weeks to months to get triaged, making many rather useless.
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  >> Apple has fixed my reported issues within a few days in the past. > These user reports take weeks to months to get triaged, making many rather useless. My experience is closer to the "a few days" as well; they were faster than the one time I remember reporting something to Google Maps. YMMV and all that, but.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  They all have that problem. My son's school is in a kafka-ish situation with Google where their listing is wrong and cannot be changed. People cannot write reviews, and data doesn't get updated. 98/100 times, updates to Apple or Google mapping products are done in hours or days. The 2/100, forget it.
  - metildaa 7y ago
    Apple Maps has a deep queue for reports about map inaccuracies, your minimum wait time is a few days 98 times out of 100. This is fixable, but it requires even more staffing than Apple already has working on Apple Maps (which is most of the people they employ in Austin and India).
- deleted 7y ago

__jal 7y ago

On the other hand, Google has a growing problem with map spam precisely because they accept user submissions. Choose your poison.