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 Not only that I wonder if operational information observations like this quickly become outdated.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...