Previously, issues were reported to Apple, who then had to vend them back to their data sources (TomTom amongst others). It was up to the data sources to implement the changes.
Now, issues reported to Apple can be immediately acted upon, or compared to other data, or reviewed by employees, or even can be marked for validation during another "drive-by".
> "There’s also the matter of corrections, updates and changes entering a long loop of submission to validation to update when you’re dealing with external partners. The Maps team would have to be able to correct roads, pathways and other updating features in days or less, not months. Not to mention the potential competitive advantages it could gain from building and updating traffic data from hundreds of millions of iPhones, rather than relying on partner data." from [0]
[0] - https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...
Wow, I've had the opposite experience. I've only used it a handful of times, but when I've reported incorrect phone numbers and such, it's always been fixed in just a few days, and I receive a notification through the app that they've done it. I found the experience to be impressively fast and painless. Sorry to hear it's not that way for everyone!
Where are you located, and what version of the OS were you running when you reported these things? For reference, I live near Palo Alto, and it's possible they are more responsive to requests here. I have only reported issues recently, with iOS 12/13.
I wonder if your corrections, like phone numbers, we're on Apple's end and much easier to correct?
Data flows downstream, from the maintainer or canonical source-of-truth to wherever it is used. It's changes in the opposite direction, upstream, that are expensive and slow.
I live in Germany and I think I was running iOS 12 when I reported the issues.
Maybe Apple only looks at reports in the USA...
I'm also a local guide though so that might have something to do with it
You can just register to OSM and fix the data and that's it. The OSM interface will update almost instantly while services based on OSM data will get the fix once they do their next data update.
post-New York renamed and a few other embarrassments, there are new steps added for verification, by some workflows, but it is in transition AFAIK
On average, Google is significantly faster at processing them, though.
Do they just have someone ground truth with satellite and street view? They do have that data for most of the corrections I make (which are frankly rare).
I wonder if this is geographic-specific.
I regularly report errors in Nevada, California, Arizona, and most recently Colorado, and they've always been corrected within a few weeks. I get an alert on my devices when it happens.
Sometimes they revert and I report them again, but I don't recall ever having a map error report ignored.
I never use Apple maps, but I have found pretty much everyone else does. My address not being in there has become a huge hassle.
I also submitted a correction in the app to no avail. So I tweeted at AppleSupport and they assigned me a dedicated support person to handle my "case". It's been weeks now. The support person keeps calling me to tell me "no word yet from the engineering team".
Thankfully I'm moving soon, but this headache applies to all the new houses in this neighborhood.
I call this "minimalist customer service".
I've reported the problem twice but never got an answer or a correction. In fact all problems I've ever reported in the Maps app were completely ignored.
This is why I don't use Apple Maps.