<story><title>Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/11/apple-maps-google-iphone-users</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>archgrove</author><text>Apple maps has reached &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; for a large number of use cases. It&amp;#x27;s now &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; to use as a satellite navigation system for a car, &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; to give me walking directions to nearby major sites&amp;#x2F;roads, and &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; as a &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m sure I&amp;#x27;m nearly at X, where the heck is it?&amp;quot; recovery tool.&lt;p&gt;It still has a pretty useless database of locations. The listings for many shops&amp;#x2F;venues in my area are literally years (sometimes decades) out of date, even after I reported them back when iOS 6 was a beta. This is slowly improving, seemingly starting with locations that are commonly visited, but it&amp;#x27;s still not there. However, given that most of my use cases are &amp;quot;Enter post (ZIP) code, go there&amp;quot;, this doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter. 90% of the time, Apple maps works fine, and there&amp;#x27;s no reason to use something else, especially when it&amp;#x27;s ad-laden.&lt;p&gt;Given that maps are not a core concern for Apple, I&amp;#x27;ve always been surprised they&amp;#x27;ve not just thrown money at improving open street maps. A few hundred million to setup an &amp;quot;OSM foundation&amp;quot; (or fund an existing one) could seriously help them (decent free mapping database to use), and hurt Google (major commercial advantage limited&amp;#x2F;eliminated). They could probably get MS onboard as well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ZeroGravitas</author><text>MS does help OSM quite a bit, primarily by providing access to Bing satellite images which can be used to trace over to create OSM data. They also hired the guy who started OSM for a while (though he left recently to go to Telenav)&lt;p&gt;And the OSM foundation does already exist:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.osmfoundation.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Main_Page&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/11/apple-maps-google-iphone-users</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>archgrove</author><text>Apple maps has reached &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; for a large number of use cases. It&amp;#x27;s now &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; to use as a satellite navigation system for a car, &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; to give me walking directions to nearby major sites&amp;#x2F;roads, and &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; as a &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m sure I&amp;#x27;m nearly at X, where the heck is it?&amp;quot; recovery tool.&lt;p&gt;It still has a pretty useless database of locations. The listings for many shops&amp;#x2F;venues in my area are literally years (sometimes decades) out of date, even after I reported them back when iOS 6 was a beta. This is slowly improving, seemingly starting with locations that are commonly visited, but it&amp;#x27;s still not there. However, given that most of my use cases are &amp;quot;Enter post (ZIP) code, go there&amp;quot;, this doesn&amp;#x27;t really matter. 90% of the time, Apple maps works fine, and there&amp;#x27;s no reason to use something else, especially when it&amp;#x27;s ad-laden.&lt;p&gt;Given that maps are not a core concern for Apple, I&amp;#x27;ve always been surprised they&amp;#x27;ve not just thrown money at improving open street maps. A few hundred million to setup an &amp;quot;OSM foundation&amp;quot; (or fund an existing one) could seriously help them (decent free mapping database to use), and hurt Google (major commercial advantage limited&amp;#x2F;eliminated). They could probably get MS onboard as well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dingaling</author><text>Just in general, whilst helping OSM is a topic, they do have Amazon affiliate links that earn them about 5% on purchases but for some reason they don&amp;#x27;t make this obvious on their website&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Merchandise#Amazon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.openstreetmap.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Merchandise#Amazon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully I&amp;#x27;ve thrown them about £50 over the past couple of years by bookmarking them as my link to Amazon.</text></comment>