iOS 6 Maps - Apple's Mistake?

A truly astonishing amount of text has been produced over the last few days covering one (fairly major) feature in iOS 6 - the new Apple Maps app. Articles like this one in The Verge make it sound like the app is totally useless and has no merit whatsoever. This isn't entirely true and my observations are that, while it undoubtedly has data problems and is lacking features offered by its Google-powered predecessor, it is actually a damn good app.

Here's what I've found.

The big new feature is Flyover, powered by technology Apple acquired by buying Swedish firm C3in October 2011. The 3D models of central London and New York (the only ones I've looked at so far) are seriously impressive. It's true that there are a few issues with the images but overall it worksvery well indeed. In fact the biggest issue is not the areas that have been mapped but those that haven't, which (at least in London) represent by far the majority of the city.

How long will it take Apple to fix this problem? The C3 promotional video (which you can find on this page) predates Apple's acquisition of the company and states that they can photograph 100km2 of terrain in an hour and generate the 3D models in five. At that rate it should be able to map all of greater London (about 1,500km2) in a week. The rest of the country would take longer - 2,500 hours for photography and 7,500 for processing; Let's call it three months of parallel processing.

That's a lot of effort but it is not, in the grand scheme of things, a lot of time. Whether Apple choose to take this route (or whether they are already part-way through the effort) remains to be seen.

What about the rest of the app? The standard, non-photographic view of the world (which until recently was the only way to view a map) is brilliantly executed. The map adds and removes detail elegantly and smoothly as you zoom in and out. You can tap into points of interest (which you couldn't do on the previous version of Maps) and view contact information, reviews and photographs. You can report data errors or other problems straight through the app.

Compared with the previous app, the crowd-sourced nature of the new Maps and its incorporation of Yelp data and reviews makes this a highly promising solution for smartphone users in urban areas. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the coming months but my prediction is that we will see rapid improvement, if only because Apple won't want to give Google any help in selling Android phones.

Despite the problems, Maps looks to me like a winner. The data and imagery issues can be corrected by Apple in the cloud (no user intervention required) and the current feature set is, if not comprehensive, very impressive. If they can lever in public transit directions, it'll be perfect.