Apple Maps and old addresses

Amidst all the discussion of Apple Intelligence and timelines that slipped—or fell off a cliff entirely—I’ve heard repeated anologies to the Apple Maps fiasco years ago. Apple shipped something that wasn’t ready, and Scott Forstall paid the price.

In the same breath I here the two discussed as mostly comparable. And that Apple always does best with software in areas it knows the most—circa its campus in California.

So now Apple is considered on par with Google Maps. That may be the case, but I figured I’d share my anecdotal experience.

In the last year or so we finally got a car new enough (or old enough, depending on how you look at it) to include CarPlay. Prior to that my wife and I always picked rental cars with CarPlay as an option. So I’ve been using it on and off for years, and often switch between the two biggest map providers to see what works better.

On the integration side of things I prefer Apple Maps, because my watch will buzz with the directions when I come close to needing to take a turn. Design wise I don’t find one obviously better than the other.

But in terms of an app I can trust to just work—function over form—Google Maps wins every time.

Last year we needed to drive from Idaho to California. I wanted to drive along the coast via Big Sur—thanks to the amazing wallpapers on MacOS years ago. I’d never been and figured it’d be worth a detour.

I wanted to see how many hours it would take to drive with the additional detour, so I put directions in via Google Maps on the desktop (using Safari—yes I know, I like to experience the web on this lovely yet outdated browser). The results were weird.

Google wouldn’t let me go that way, instead insisting on a massive detour around the area I wanted to visit. I kept trying, dragging the map route back and forth to force it to snap in place. Finally I gave up, thinking something must be wrong.

I put the same directions into the Apple Maps Mac app (that’s a bit of a tongue twister) and found what I needed, the amount of hours it would take to drive.

I moved on with my planning.

Several days later, through sheer serendipity, a friend told me that Big Sur experienced a massive landslide eight months prior, and part of the road was shut down.

I went back and checked local news sources and sure enough, the road was closed.

At first I’d thought Google was flaking out, but it was refusing to let me go that way because travel alongside that route was impossible.

I’d have probably caught it eventually, but it just floored me that Apple didn’t have any knowledge of this event, despite that fact that Big Sur is pretty much right in Cupertino’s backyard.

I even went back to Apple and tried again, yup. It happily told me to drive along a washed out road.

This has stuck with me since. I still try Apple and Google side by side on a regular basis. But I don’t trust Apple Maps at all.

When we ended up going on that trip another part of Big Sur washed out two days prior, skuttling any plans to at least try to visit part of the beautiful scenic highway. Thankfully I’d given up on trying Apple altogether at that point.

If I mostly know the route I’m fine putting using Apple. But I always have a bit of skepticism and have to trade off the convenience of directions appearing on my watch versus maybe being steered wrong.

Recently I had an appointment in town at an office location I couldn’t quite place. I was in my older car (it doesn’t have CarPlay) and so I chose to go with Apple Maps for the watch directions. I find that easier than placing the phone near the dashboard for directions.

Apple took me to the location, but the building was fenced off. I remembered visiting the same place a decade earlier. Something was wrong. I circled the parking lot, then finally put the same address into Google Maps. It pointed me to a new location half a mile down the road. Sure enough, that location was correct. I made my appointment with two minutes to spare.

Now, in both cases it’s a simple matter of data not being updated. But these aren’t recent events. One trip would have put us out of the way for hours had I trusted Apple, and the other nearly caused me to be late to an appointment.

Apple mostly works. But I don’t trust it.

Google—hopefully for the long haul—just works.