If privacy is worth something to you, it’s clearly better than Google.

I, too, use Apple as my primary map. In many cases, Apple Maps is better Google. The ones in which it’s behind are more than made up for by Apple’s values.

Is it? Has everyone forgotten the Yelp tracking beacon? Good thing Apple relies on Yelp for business info and has pretty deep Yelp integration with the mobile app.

https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/

This Wikipedia article has a few examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification

I suspect that all the news articles reporting on this issue are probably greatly misunderstanding how technology works.

> And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address — once every five minutes. [1]

Literally any load balancer is going to know what IP address you're coming from. Having a website logging your IP address is not cause for alarm. A good mitigator for this probelm would be to disable background activity for Yelp or any other apps you feel do not need that sort of access.

The journalist also makes no attempt to explain what steps they took to attempt to change their Yelp account preferences. They did not inform us whether or not they were logged in or opted in or out of any particular preferences. That's what makes the story so unhelpful.

A more useful version of that article should be informing people to make a check on all their account preferences every time they sign up for a service. Usually, marketing and telemetry settings are on by default. I most definitely don't agree with this, but it's not unique to Yelp.

Perhaps you're also referring to a lawsuit in progress regarding the way in which Yelp transfers contacts? [2]

In this case, the arguments center around some rather nebulous contract law, in my layman's understanding of the case. Again, your OS already protects you - if you never grant an application access to your contacts, you never have to worry about the transmission of that data.

It should be smartphone 101 that allowing an application data access will allow it forever, because that's how iOS has worked since day one. Again, we need more protections in the form of laws, not just conventions, and I don't agree with the idea that data can be sent around willy nilly, but this is the reality baked in to all mobile applications. Once you give third party code access to your data in a rather explicit fashion, it's not in your control what's done with it.

So this still sounds bad, perhaps, but also, an iPhone with the default install and iCloud login is much more private than Google with a Google Account login. In Google's case, Google Maps has seen everything and can correlate it to your email content, business search activity, current location, and a host of other data especially if you use their search engine or YouTube. In Apple's case, Apple Maps just opened up yelp.com within Safari when you click on a business result (unless you explicitly install the Yelp app and give it permissions).

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/while-youre-sleeping-y...

[2] https://www.courthousenews.com/data-mining-privacy-suit-agai...

You sure about that? For me tapping on any business info takes me straight to the iOS app store.

A bit of a sidenote, but the worst part is that now Yelp doesn't just nag you to get the app and/or login. It displays the nag splash page and doesn't let you see any information at all until you install the app and/or login.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Apple's data is flat out junk in London. Garbage.

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.

Choose your poison.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You're right, if you click around in the Maps app (desktop or mobile) it takes you straight to the shady source (yelp.com).

Edit: Also this:

https://www.courthousenews.com/data-mining-privacy-suit-agai...

Apple Maps doesn't use Yelp as a primary data source. It's used to add extra information (like reviews and photos) to existing points of interest, but the points of interest themselves are catalogued by Apple or their data providers. If you click around in Apple Maps a bit, you'll find that not all POIs have Yelp data.

> Edit: Also this: [a lawsuit about social features in the Yelp app]

I'm not sure how this is relevant.

Apple Maps steers you pretty hard towards the Yelp app if you want any business info.

Is it? It was widely reported at the time (e.g., [1, 2]) that they were getting rid of Google Maps and creating Apple Maps because Google wanted to keep spoken turn-by-turn directions an Android-only feature.

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2012/09/get_the_fainting_chair

[2]: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-jilted-google-maps-over-verb...

It’s trivial to lump things together in GAAP accounting statements.

(Hint: your pithy statement is equally meaning free)

I reverted to the HERE maps app for navigation which worked perfectly, but does not appear to be compatible with CarPlay yet, so I had to use a mount for the phone.

Apple Maps in Melbourne, Australia is fantastic. I find their public transport directions better, and their driving directions on-par.

Likewise there are many many ways to make money - and when you have other companies who do similar things to you, which route you choose makes you appeal to one sector of the market over another. Differentiation is where vision and values become important (although of course you need to actually turn that into action to be meaningful).

They say that they try to do as much processing on device as possible and when data (for stuff like Maps) is submitted centrally, they anonymise the data collection - so they can learn usage information without knowing who it's from.

We don't know exactly how effective this is, as they are a secretive company, and this doesn't mean that bugs and breaches don't happen. But they make the point that, as their revenue comes from products and services, not targeted advertising, they don't need that data collection in order to grow the business.

I think personally, I don't find it believable that one of the world's largest public companies would have the discipline to forgo a revenue stream as big as advertising over the long term. If they have the data they'll eventually use it IMHO.

It's interesting to think of privacy concerns as split between concerns about sharing data with a "counterparty" company, and concerns about sharing data with a third party like an advertiser. I think I'm at least as concerned about giving data to a counter party as I am to giving it to a third party.

I never really thought about privacy conerns as beeing the concern that one's data could leave a BIGTECH company. Always thought about it as allowing one of those companies access in the first place.

For example, with maps, they chop your travel into pieces with no common identifiers.

So that way, they get traffic information and can understand which routes are busy or frequently used.

But, because there's no identifiers involved and it's broken into pieces before it reaches them, even if they wanted to, they can't tie that data back to you or recreate your actual journey on a particular day.

Which in turn means they can't build a picture of where you, as an individual, go.

That's a rough paraphrase of what Apple have said, anyway.

As far as revenue streams go, they make their money from hardware and increasingly subscription services. Differentiation is important - and because of their business model, they can talk about privacy in a way that their competition cannot.

Google Maps does a very nice job for bikes. If I should wish something of Google Maps it would be “I bring my bike on the train” routes, which is a very common and nice way to get around here in Denmark at least.

Bonus points if they build in cost optimization, ie, "take the train 80% of the way there and then Uber for the last leg, optionally saving you 20 mins for an extra $8, or bring a bike to save 10 mins for no extra cost". I'm reading that Citymapper might do this in London, but I've not seen it in their NYC version unless I'm just being dense?

It works alright. Sometimes it works really well, but I just tested it out now for a short trip and it suggests going too many stops out of my way to get a citibike. Not sure why, as there are bikes available at closer stations.

I also don't think it supports the idea of "I have a bike". It's mostly transferring from public transport to a bike share and vice versa.

> Bonus points if they build in cost optimization, ie, "take the train 80% of the way there and then Uber for the last leg,

It does do this (or at least is doing it in my current test). If I ask for directions from home to LGA, one of the Labs options is to take the G to the 7 to Junction Blvd and then take an Uber for $10-14. An UberX from my home to LGA right now costs $24.60

Getting all that data for a single city would be impressive, let alone around the world.

Not that Google couldn't do it of course.

These routes are only as good as the data, but at least in Western Europe, the map data is quite accurate.

...if you need bike routes for daily map app use.

Since I don't, should I also not use it because of this reason?

I’ve just started testing Apple Maps as Google Maps replacement, and the quality seems to be highly dependent on the location. Cities, densely populated areas seem fine, but I’m currently traveling somewhat rural polish areas and apple maps seems to have no distinction between solid country roads and unpaved path. If it shows up on a map, you can travel it seems to be its credo.

Is anyone aware of a setting/workaround to use OSM in DDG instead of apple maps? I would rather provide my free labor to an open project, and I'm most likely to submit corrections when I notice them from a search.

For navigation, Waze can't find a route 1/5 times for a longer trip, and Google Maps gets weirder and more hostile to use every few months. For me, they have tweaked their routing engine to be more "creative" and direct you in weird ways. Big G is too fat and happy and they need a challenge.

Apple Maps is fine now from an accuracy POV. They are more conservative about routing and Apple gives the app privileged treatment on iOS that improves the UX while driving. Now that Apple seems to be embracing letting services move beyond their platform, I think we'll see them give Google a run for their money.