Apple's home-grown Maps
leaves users lost
By Poornima Gupta
SAN FRANCISCO | Fri Sep
21, 2012 7:49am IST
(Reuters) - An entire city
is in the ocean, a farm has been labeled as an airport, highways end in the
middle of nowhere and a hospital now covers the center of British city
Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's birthplace.
Welcome to the new world
of Apple Maps that greeted iPhone and iPad users when they downloaded the
highly anticipated update to the consumer giant's mobile software platform, iOS
6.
Apple Inc's home-grown
Maps feature was introduced with much fanfare in June by Apple's software chief
Scott Forstall and is a direct challenge to the same service offered by
ally-turned-rival Google Inc.
But the app is already
facing criticism from users globally for a number of geographical errors,
missing information and because it lacks features that made Google Maps so
popular, including public transit directions, comprehensive traffic data or
street view pictures.
Apple Maps has replaced
Google Maps, which is no longer available on iOS 6.
Many users who downloaded
Apple's iOS 6 software, released on Wednesday, took to Twitter and online
forums to express their frustration at the glitches.
"The people who
thought the world was flat were more accurate cartographers than Apple
Maps," @RayneBradley said on Twitter.
"Apple Maps also have
errors in business listings. I went to call a local taxi driver and it was a
taxidermist (seriously)," said @TomDavenport on Twitter.
Apple spokeswoman Trudy
Muller said the company launched the new service knowing it was a major
initiative.
"We are continuously
improving it, and as Maps is a cloud-based solution, the more people use it,
the better it will get," she said. "We're also working with
developers to integrate some of the amazing transit apps in the App Store into
iOS Maps."
"We appreciate all of
the customer feedback and are working hard to make the customer experience even
better," she added.
The criticism comes as
Apple's iPhone 5 hits stores around the globe. The iPhone 5 comes pre-loaded
with the new iOS 6 software and Maps.
Users have created a
Tumblr blog sarcastically dubbed "The Amazing iOS 6 Maps" where many
have posted screen shots of the errors (theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com/).
Pictures showed the Norwegian town of Leknes in the Norwegian sea, the entire
city center of Stratford-upon-Avon is labeled as a hospital.
Some of the errors have
even irked politicians. Irish Minister for Justice Alan Shatter said he was
surprised to discover that Airfield - a 35-acre estate with working farm and
café in center of his constituency in Dundrum, on the outskirts of Dublin - has
been labeled with the image of an aircraft.
He said this could be
dangerous for pilots and suggested in a statement that Apple use the image of
"a cow, a goat, a sheep, a flower" instead, and that an
"aircraft is an entirely inappropriate flight of imagination".
Users in Asia were
surprised to see two sets of the disputed islands known by Japan as the Senkaku
and by China as the Diaoyu. Some joked that this was Apple's effort at
providing a diplomatic solution to Japan and China, both of which claim the
islands.
NOT AN EASY FIX
New York city residents
were unhappy that Apple maps doesn't offer public transit directions, one of
the most-used features on Google Maps in cities.
"My phone should be
able to tell me which bus and train to take," said Kenan Ali, a Brooklyn,
New York, resident who exclusively uses public transport in the city and has
been an iPhone user since 2008. "I am hoping in the next update they will
somehow add transit directions."
Apple's map service comes
with three-dimensional images of cities called "Flyover" along with
real-time traffic updates and also turn-by-turn navigation, the last a feature
that Google has in Android devices but had not made available in Apple devices.
Apple licenses mapping
data from vehicle navigation systems maker TomTom. TomTom said it stands behind
the quality of its maps but didn't develop the app.
"During the process
of turning mapping data into an app, every manufacturer does it their own
way," said TomTom spokesperson Cem Cohen. "We are not part of that
process. Apple uses exactly the same maps as our other customers."
Cohen said TomTom hasn't
talked to Apple about the issues.
While in theory it will be
possible for Apple to update Maps with a software fix, the problems appear to
be "pretty profound and pretty fundamental," said Marcus Thielking,
co-founder of Skobbler, maker of the popular GPS Navigation 2 app, built using
the crowdsourced OpenStreetMap platform.
"The question is
really how much expertise do they have in-house and what they sourced from
third parties," Thielking said, adding that Apple needed people with very
specific skills to fix it. "It's not their core competence," he
added.
Google, for its part, did not
say whether it would do a Google Maps app for iOS 6. Users now have to access
Google Maps through the browser.
"Our goal is to make
Google Maps available to everyone who wants to use it, regardless of device,
browser, or operating system," the company said in a statement.
Apple shares closed down
about 0.5 percent at $698.70 on Thursday, a day after reaching an all-time high
of $703.99. The shares have gained over 20 percent in the past 3-1/2 months in
the build-up to the launch of the iPhone 5.
(Additional reporting by
Alistair Barr in San Francisco and Roberta Cowan in Amsterdam; Editing by Peter
Henderson, Richard Chang and Alex Richardson)
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