In Japan right now and google has an edge on the amount of transit data they provide in the maps.
In North America, much more even and I think Apple Maps may be faster too as a system service. Better integration for Apple Watch too.
I use Apple Maps for the integration with my Apple Watch. I also prefer the design and privacy Apple offers over Google. So, in summation, I hate Google.
Waze!
Which is basically google maps with a couple extra features. In my utterly unscientific, purely anecdotal study I’ve found the traffic and routing data to be better at avoiding traffic and providing more accurate arrival times. This data was collected over a long diving vacation where my wife and I both had maps up (me:waze, her:Amaps) and about two thirds of the way through in asked her why her Waze was giving her different (and substantially shittier) directions than on my phone (both are iPhones). When I looked at her phone it clearly wasn’t using Waze. She didn’t realize she had defaulted back to Apple Maps.
I don’t mind Apple Maps, generally, and the watch integration, like everything else, is excellent. But I mostly hate how ugly my Apple Watch is and rarely wear it anymore.
I always used Google Maps, but in recent years it became almost unusable. It only shows you paid ads.
Apple isn’t great either, but it’s better than Google.
I swapped to OSM, which isn’t perfect either but you can change the info and sometimes it even has better info than the other too.
I use google for most things, for several reasons:
- Google seems to have more data. Hours, reviews, photos, including usually more recent and frequent street views. They also have pretty good live traffic data
- Access to offline maps. Nice to have a backup when you have no service. As far as I know, Apple Maps doesn’t offer offline maps except for your current route.
- It syncs with my desktop use of google maps, including custom maps.
- Apple Maps sucked when it first came out. Left a bad taste in my mouth
- For navigation, unless I need an offline maps, I use Waze. Not part of Google maps, but owned by google.
Access to offline maps. Nice to have a backup when you have no service. As far as I know, Apple Maps doesn’t offer offline maps except for your current route
Apple Maps has that feature in the current beta version.
Apple Maps sucked when it first came out. Left a bad taste in my mouth
Maybe you should give it a second try. A brand new product is always going to be worse than an established one. Now that both products are established, it’s a different story. It takes time to implement features like offline maps (in that case, it also takes time to negotiate intellectual property rights for the feature).
Google Maps is still better at some things, but Apple Maps is better at most things. Exactly how much depends on your city… Apple tends to do particularly well in cities where they have a lot of users (a good mapping service needs data collection, and everyone who uses an iPhone is collecting data anonymously… even when you use Waze on your iPhone you are reporting realtime traffic data back to Apple).
They should have had offline maps at launch. And Apple certainly has the resources to launch a very polished product from the start. They rushed it because the wanted to kill the Google partnership ASAP as Android grew.
Frankly, it just adds to reasons I am pissed at Apple. Dark Sky was an incredible app, and even as Apple bought it and supposedly incorporated it into Apple Weather, Apple Weather is and remains hot garbage. The radar doesn’t load 90% of the time and the interface sucks. Try telling me Apple Weather is a new product.
They only rushed it as google wanted user data and apple didn’t want to give them that. So yes it was rushed, but for all the right reasons.
Google Maps is better for traffic data and it’s “live map” (basically any information that relies on to the minute information).
This is it for me. 95% of my usage of maps is while I’m driving, and I need live data so I can be rerouted immediately if there’s a sudden change of traffic ahead, or if I take a wrong turn or exit.
