What's still wrong with Apple Maps?
I’ve been thinking about Apple Maps. It’s the only map software I use on my iPhone — I haven’t installed Google’s app — but I don’t like it as much as Google Maps on iOS 5. I tried to unpack why that is, and came up with three main points. Fix these, and it’ll be useable.
1. The points of interest database is very lacking
This is the main one. I was in Harrogate the other day, and I searched for “Harrogate Turkish Baths”. It was nowhere to be found. Searching for “Harrogate Baths” found a load of useless results, such as “Lakeland” (a household goods shop).
Generic searches aren’t that great either. Searching for “Cake shop” in Harrogate had me travel to Leeds. It also found “Pie Shop” in Rippon — that’s a localisation fail IMO, as “Pie Shop” implies savoury pies in England.
Also, it often finds business over places. If I search for “High Street”, I will not be looking for “High Street Pharmacy”.
2. The search uses the current position of the map view as scope, but not the current user location
When you search in Apple maps, it cleverly takes into account where you are looking. If the map is centred on Manchester and I search for “Pizza Hut”, it’ll find me some Pizza Hut restaurants in Manchester. This is fine when you’re searching for a brand that’s found in many places, or if you’re searching for something generic like “Newsagent”.
It’s also fine if you’re searching for something where there is only one in the country. If you put the town in the text you search for (like “Yuyi Dragon, Coventry”) then this works.
The problem is if you’re searching for something semi-generic but not that common, such as a road name. Maps tries to search the area on the screen, but then can’t find any places. What it actually does then is keeps zooming out and trying the search again, until it’s found somewhere. This is confusing, as it has moved the screen often quite a distance, but it’s unrelated to where the user is. So if, as is typical, I’d left the map centred on wherever I had been last, and then I searched for a road name (intending to search for such a road near where I physically am), it’d find the closest thing matching that road name near where the map was showing.
I’m not sure what the perfect answer to this is, but Google didn’t annoy me in this manner. It might be related to Apple’s search tending to favour business names over place names — I’m more often searching for a road, town or village than I am a business. (It should be noted that searching for fully disambiguated street addresses works fine — it’s the fuzzy matching that is poor.)
3. Motorways should be blue. A Roads should be green.
I can’t get past this. In the UK, roads on maps have standard colours. Making them all white or orange is not OK. I’ve tried to get used to it, but it’s just not possible.
It’s often vital to know the classification of a road. As a pedestrian, you can’t walk down motorways or some A-roads. Lots of people don’t like driving on motorways, especially for short journeys.
Apple have correctly coloured the road number labels (e.g. “M4” or “A238”), but the roads themselves remain uncoloured.