Skip to main content

What Is Going on Between Apple and Google Regarding the Maps Deal?

By VJ
Apple, in the beginning of the year, created its own maps application, Apple Maps that proved to be a fiasco. It was riddled with mistakes—missing areas, low-quality pictures, poor choice of colors, incorrect information, etc. It has been a tremendous shame to an innovative company like Apple. After its decision to create a map to provide better navigation to its customers, Apple probably had too little time to develop a full-fledged application from ground up (despite the fact that there was Apple Maps since the first iPhone, they decided to create Maps from the ground up).

A few days ago, Apple CEO, Tim Cook apologized to the customers regarding the inferior mapping tool.

What Is Wrong With Apple Maps?


A lot is wrong with Apple Maps. Here are a few gaffes:

Ireland’s BreakingNews.ie reported this: Airfield House is a farmland in Dublin, Ireland, and Apple Maps identifies this as an airport.

BBC has reported: Search for Manchester United Football Club, and you will be getting ‘Sale United Football Club’ which is a football community for children. Certain missing areas include Solihull and Stratford-upon-Avon (the birthplace of William Shakespeare), and Uckfield in Sussex is wrongly placed.

HuffPost has reported non-existing places found on Apple Maps: Aldwych Station (closed for over eighteen years); Woolworths (closed since 1997); F Chamberlain & Sons (closed for over 15 years).

failure of apple maps showing non-existing places

Guardian of the UK reported that when you search for London, you get the town named London in Ontario, Canada. And Paddington station is missing in the Maps search function.

Australian Business Traveller has reported recently: Park Hyatt hotel in Tokyo is missing in search (but the location database can find it); the Tokyo railway station is not showing up in search. Also, the center pin on even the important cities like London and New York is placed at the most obscure of locations.

not working apple maps search function

Haartez has reported that Israel the country has no capital in Apple Maps. There is no Jerusalem!

The New York Times has reported another error in Florida, where a supermarket was replaced by a hospital in Apple’s famed maps.

Besides these, there are many pictures, some funny fakes and some real that appear on image search for ‘apple maps’. Here is a mashup of some of them. Click to enlarge:

mistakes and plain blunders in apple maps

Latest Google Maps


Another report from Apple Insider has pointed us in another direction. According to them, Apple knew the troubles of iOS Maps before launch.

However, that’s all history right now. Google is bringing up its own version of Maps to get approval by Apple in the coming days. According to the WSJ, Google is currently field-testing the app before submission to Apple. And they have their fingers crossed for Apple approval, which according to the industry-talk is a big thing.

After the Maps failure, Apple probably has realized that it is going to affect the brand in a big way, and that is the reason behind the letter by Tim Cook. However, even in that letter, Mr. Cook doesn’t speak much about the mistakes of Apple Maps in any detail. In fact he is just recommending other map apps to customers.

At this point, Apple has no go other than approving Google’s product which will be launched soon for iPhone 5. In the meanwhile, iOS customers have no other option than using Google Maps on the browser or installing it as a widget within the browser for quick opening.

Conclusion


Apple has made a huge dent on its brand identity with this humiliating failure of Maps. Still, the company has a huge number of customers to its products. Let’s wait and see how it will progress in the coming days.

[Image credit: Forbes; HuffPost; ausbt.com.au; weknowmemes.com]
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

A Tablet Running Both Windows and Android Side By Side

By VJ
The latest innovation from Samsung is the ATIV Q tablet, a streamlined 13-inch tablet that is extremely powerful and not that chunky for a tight competitor to the likes of Microsoft Surface Pro. It is thin, extremely powerful, and has a large brilliant QHD resolution screen, which is higher than Full HD. QHD is 3200x1800 pixels, while FHD is 1920x1280 pixels. Let’s take a brief look at this device. Technical Specifications The tablet-laptop mash-up is not yet in the market. We may update this post as it is made available in the market. Here are the brief technical specifications of the tablet. Display 13.3 inch; 3200x1800 px (the highest in the market); 16 million colors Processor Intel Haswell Core i5 processor (details unknown) RAM 4 GB Graphics Intel HD 4000 Storage 128 GB SSD Battery life 9 hours of usage Operating system(s) Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean; Windows 8 ...
Read the full article »

10 Worst Android Antivirus Apps You Can Get

By VJ
Are you careful about the security of your smartphone? For your Android device, Google Play store offers a number of antivirus apps. There are paid and free apps from professional companies like Avast!, Kaspersky, and Lookout, as well as free antivirus apps that install and work relatively faster. Among the security apps found on the Play Store, there are a number of free, lightweight ones, most of which enjoy a great number of downloads and high ratings. Most of the ratings are done by people who find the interface easy to use, but have no idea whether the app actually works or not. Many of us feel the app is great if the interface is cool, don’t we? It is painful to note that most of these free apps not only fail at most antivirus tests, but experts regard them to be incapable of detecting any threat. Last year, the latest mobile antivirus test report was published by AV-Test.org , in which they tested and rated the best and the worst antivirus programs among multiple platforms. ...
Read the full article »

Why Apple’s Retina Display No Longer Matters?

By VJ
Apple trademarked Retina Display in Nov, 2012. Retina Display is one of the major attractions of Apple’s top products. Introduced with the iPhone 4, during Steve Jobs’s reign, it sure sold quite a number of iPhones in two years. At this time, however, is Retina Display still relevant? Should Apple be actively marketing this feature at all? Let’s see. What Exactly Is It? Retina Display or any display at that matter has a particular ppi ratio (Pixels Per Inch). [ Learn about pixels ]. If, on a display panel, there are more than a fixed number of pixels in every inch, that display will be rich enough to avoid the pixelation issue given by older, low pixel-density devices. If you can see individual pixels, such a display looks rather dull. Look at this image below. One of half of the Apple logo is pixelated, and you can see the difference. Creating too many pixels and cramming them up within a display is a very expensive job. This is the reason why mainstream smartphone manufacture...
Read the full article »