Is Apple Maps even Apple for iPhone 4? Because if it's not, then it would've probably had the same issues. iPhone 4 had a really slow GPU - one of the slowest around at the time it launched, especially with the "retina display". It consistently scored at the bottom of GPU benchmarks. Remember the iPhone 4S GPU was 7x faster according to Apple.

You're certainly right about its CPU being very slow, but still, all other apps that use Apple's UIKit (standard visual elements, like menu bars, sliders, buttons, etc. - it doesn't matter if they're "stock", or are heavily modified/themed) are just as fast as they are on iPhone 5 or iPad 4.

GMaps uses something else for the UI (the "slide from side" thing) and that's the problem.

Still, I'm not really complaining. As a developer I know it's hard to write something that both pleases you aesthetically, and is performant on all devices!

"I have a 2 1/2 year old phone, and applications, especially animations, don't render as fast".

I'm not entirely surprised, admittedly - and depending on your use case (for me, anyway), it doesn't so much matter.

Animations in built-in apps are buttery smooth, and always have been, ever since the first iPhone. The problem is with newer iOS apps that are either unoptimized or heavily UIWebView based. The newest Gmail app is definitely mostly HTML5, and I suspect this one is as well.

I wouldn't go that far, my ex's 3GS struggled when upgraded to iOS 5, and complaints about that were widespread.

Wow, my jaw is on the floor because of a huge, but sorely lacking feature in this app: the ability to edit the name of a starred location. This isn't a problem if I want to star "Steve's Pizza" since that's how it shows up in their directory, but what about my grandmother's house? I can star her location, sure, but it'll appear in the search history list as a random address once it's one of many other such entries. Am I wrong to think this is a massive oversight over a common use-case? Let's put the Google praise parade on hold and reflect on this for a second.

TL;DR You can't edit the name of your starred locations from the iOS Google Maps app.

Doesn't seem like a 'massive oversight' to me. Definitely a 'should have' feature, but not something that needed to be in this release from an MVP perspective.

This was one of the first things I noticed as well. It seems like such basic functionality (the maps app in iOS had this since at least iOS3), I was amazed to find you can't edit them in the app (thankfully you can see @andrewaylett's comment for a way to do it).

There are several serious bugs in the saved locations functionality. I found that if you 'pin' a location (say a building) on the map (by pressing and holding) it will show the address. But when you 'save' it, the details of the address get 'lost' when looking at your search history. I ended up with multiple entries in my list titled 'Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan' (which is the equivalent of, say, 'Manhatten, New York, USA'. Clicking each one still takes you to the correct location on the map, but they are impossible to tell apart in the list. Also then when using the 'directions' widget on the map and picking the destination, these saved locations appeared as longitude/latitude! I wonder if these issues are specific to Japan? I submitted feedback about this.

That being said, overall the app is quite impressive, and I'm sure it will improve.

You can't do this from the Android version either, it's an annoying oversight. I've resorted to taking all important locations and putting them into a custom map; the location markers in custom maps /can/ be named.

I've found you can edit the names of starred locations through Google Bookmarks: https://www.google.com/bookmarks

Ironically, while you can edit them with IOS 6 Maps, you can't get directions to Siri to them - even if you name them as a Contact or Bookmark.