Apple to drop Google Maps in iOS 6 for in-house Maps?

http://9to5mac.com/2012/05/11/ios-6-apple-drops-google-maps-debuts-in-house-maps-with-incredible-3d-mode/

by blearyeyed • 14 years ago

179 139 14 years ago

9to5mac.com

canthonytucci• 14 years ago

Here's hoping I don't have to go back and change all my my UIMapView code.

thornofmight• 14 years ago

Can someone more knowledgable on the subject elaborate on how exactly this 3d works?

aw3c22• 14 years ago

You take aerial imagery and laser-scan/photogrametric data. You can create rough 3D models from the aerial images already if they overlap enough. The laserscanning data and terrestrial photos can be used for more detail and accuracy. You could also use government data if your government provides geodata like coordinates, houses etc.

It is impressive but not really hard (theoretically).

Check out eg http://maps3d.svc.nokia.com/webgl/index.html

xanadohnt2• 14 years ago

What's this laser scanning? Vector topographic data and aerial imagery is all that's necessary.

bgarbiak• 14 years ago

Here's how Nokia did it: http://youtu.be/emKttWFcJ_g (simplistically)

T-zex• 14 years ago

Will they provide an offline mode?

megablast2• 14 years ago

They would probably provide caching, which is what the current map application does. Hopefully they will let you pre-cache areas, such as you can do in Android, but I doubt it. Anyway, no point speculating too much.

yellowbkpk2• 14 years ago

This entire article boils down to one sentence "According to trusted sources, Apple has an incredible headline feature in development for iOS 6: a completely in-house maps application."

The rest of it is speculation about what might exist.

LaSombra• 14 years ago

That's the Apple's distortion field in action.

jkap• 14 years ago

No, it's shitty journalism in action.

deepGem• 14 years ago

As speculative as it seems, this coincides with that mapping company Apple bought in recent times. Forgot the name of the company, but they had some beautiful 3D views of select cities. For all you know Apple might make 3D maps standard in iOS 6. Damn, wouldn't that be something :).

robin_reala• 14 years ago

That would be Nokia. See:

http://maps3d.svc.nokia.com/webgl/

streblo• 14 years ago

That would be Placebase http://blogs.computerworld.com/14835/apple_purchased_mapping...

untog• 14 years ago

Honestly, the utility of 3D maps is way overblown. Even satellite map tiles are too- way too much extra, unimportant information.

yellowbkpk2• 14 years ago

Apple bought three geo-related companies in the last few years. My guess is C3 Technologies for 3D/"satellite" layer, Poly9 for the street maps layer, and Placebase for the POI. I imagine they've been working on unifying them for a while now and we will see the fruit of that labor soon.

damncabbage• 14 years ago

In particular, the breathless "Video: What the Hoover Dam will look like on the iOS 6 3D Map mode".

laconian2• 14 years ago

The headline is obnoxious too. It hasn't happened. It might happen, but the way they wrote it makes it sound like Tim Cook got on a podium and announced that to the world.

brudgers• 14 years ago

And yet there it is on the front page of HN.

n9com• 14 years ago

What happens to apps that use MapKit?

kyleslattery• 14 years ago

I imagine it would just keep on working exactly the same, except that the map tiles will look slightly different.

shinratdr3• 14 years ago

I think that is answered by the fact that Apple called it MapKit instead of GoogleMaps or something along those lines.

jasonkostempski• 14 years ago

How about spoken turn-by-turn navigation first so people can stop risking their lives and the peoples lives around them every time a turn is coming up?

smackfu4• 14 years ago

Waze is decent and free and uses crowd-sourced map corrections.

xanadohnt2• 14 years ago

Waze is OK but you'll need an overall intuition of your route and not follow it blindly contrary to how many people use their GPS. Imagine heading north on a highway and needing to get on an intersecting highway going west. Often it'll tell you to "take a left" onto the other highway forsaking the reality that you should veer right and take the cloverleaf exit. It will also give routes that don't exist. Again with the intersecting highways: imagine the two aren't connected where they intersect. Waze may go ahead and route you through an imaginary exit.

But know your route and Waze can be helpful and even a little fun.

smiler• 14 years ago

Or how about people take responsibility for their own safety and the safety of others by using a product which does support spoken turn-by-turn?

rkudeshi5• 14 years ago

I'm not sure it's fair to pin that on Apple. There are a number of navigation apps in the App Store, free and paid, that anyone can download (I use Navigon and it's paid for itself a hundred times over).

It's not as if Apple doesn't permit them, they just choose not to include it for free.

Would you say Google is obligated to add free text messages to Android just because Apple has it (iMessage) and it saves money for people?

matt312• 14 years ago

Well, in all fairness, Google does offer free text messages in Android via Google Voice.

rvkennedy• 14 years ago

And all I want is a decent Google Maps app on my iPhone. The Android map is so far above what iOS offers - having recently lost my Galaxy s2 to a freak elevator accident I thought I'd go back to iPhone for a while, and this was one of many shocks to the system. I'm approaching the feeling that the only things iPhone does better than Android (for my purposes) is store music and sync podcasts.

marvin• 14 years ago

Did you drop the phone into the tiny crack between the elevator car and the wall? Because I have nightmares about doing that whenever I carry a smartphone around an elevator.

nikomen• 14 years ago

I thought I was the only person who ever had these nightmares. I almost always put my phone in my pocket before stepping in and out of an elevator.

megablast2• 14 years ago

I have the opposite opinion, when I lots my iPhone and fell back on my Nexus One. The maps were awful, it would never get my current positions. Preloading map areas sounded like a great idea, but it never worked well for me. It would constantly forget the surrounding area, even 1 minute after it was just working.

I understand the Google version uses vectors rather than images, so it should work better, but never did for me.

st3fan• 14 years ago

Maybe Siri will now also start working in Canada. Seriously, what is holding Apple back. Is Google stalling that?

dabeeeenster• 14 years ago

What a lot of hot air. The killer aspect of Google Maps on Android is the turn by turn navigation with traffic. That saves me hundreds of £ a year and is just brilliant.

"but it is described as a much cleaner, faster, and more reliable experience"

I'm sorry, but what a lot of bullshit.

fierarul3• 14 years ago

Either you have a fleet of trucks or you are overestimating how much Android's navigation is saving you.

When my GPS broke down, I didn't start using my phone, I just bought another GPS for 99 euro.

(And funny thing is the old one has just some loose wires and could be fixed a few months later by an electrician.)

sohn• 14 years ago

We're really happy for you, you have so much money you can afford to waste it.

But normal people doesn't.

stanleydrew2• 14 years ago

It seems awfully strange to nit pick about the savings. So what if it's saving him only £50 per year or whatever? Can we agree that it's nonzero? Ok great. Now we can move on to addressing the meat of the comment.

Which is that iOS users have been denied the luxury of excellent and free turn-by-turn navigation available on Android, and this maps update does nothing to address that.

chrisrhoden6• 14 years ago

I think you're forgetting how much a device of similar capability to the Android navigation cost before it was free on most smartphones. And subscription costs. Your inexpensive GPS unit was put on perpetual clearance by the app you're disparaging.

nobleach• 14 years ago

The genius in Android's system is not necessarily the navigation. It's the METHOD for performing the navigation. Google parses your email and texts for potential addresses that you can click to launch navigation.

Every other GPS system, including the expensive Navigon package I bought for my iPhone ask you State? City? Street? Number? Oh how I'd love for someone to be able to text me their address while I'm driving and be able to click the link and be automatically routed.

Google's upper hand is in integration. If I had a Tom Tom or a Garmin that could read my email or texts and then start navigating, I'd buy it.

borlak• 14 years ago

Google maps could definitely be improved upon. it makes mistakes all the time, and the huge feature they brag about -- being cloud based / up to date -- is never up to date enough to really matter. there has been construction going on for months on a major road in my city, and google maps still pretends it is open. so much for the cloud.

Heliosmaster2• 14 years ago

openstreetmaps is much faster for that kind of things :) not unlike wikipedia is much faster at updating than a normal encyclopedia, or something like that.

roc2• 14 years ago

Yeah, I can't say I've ever had a problem with Google's maps on iOS being unreliable, slow or ... whatever problem is supposedly corrected by a 'cleaner' app.

I'm sure Apple could improve those things and I may well notice and appreciate the improvements. But I'd much rather see turn by turn navigation and useful traffic data. [1]

[1] By useful, I just mean something proactive and actionable. Allowing me to manually scan my route to look for yellow and red highlights doesn't really help. And by the time I know I'm in a jam, it's not a huge help to know how far the jam is. It's nice, but I'm already in the jam.

It would be awesome if we could get something that takes a programmed commute and sends notifications about backups not yet encountered and offers alternate routes -- taking into account the full traffic situation. So that if the 'obvious' detour is already also backed up, it doesn't send me that way either.

randomfool• 14 years ago

Google's maps on Android kicks iOS's butt- the vector rendering makes it much much faster, turn-by-turn navigation and offline mode.

In case you aren't aware, the Android version doesn't download the image tiles, rather it downloads the raw data and renders the streets and everything client side. This makes it much faster to get the data and makes a smoother zoom experience.

muraiki• 14 years ago

I remember when my wife got her iPhone 4S. We were heading out to somewhere and, having an Android phone for work and seeing that her iPhone had a Google Maps application, figured that we could use her phone to help us get to our destination.

Imagine my surprise when not only did it not have turn by turn navigation, but it didn't recalculate the route when we made a wrong turn and were clearly driving off of the calculated path. I couldn't believe that such a feature was missing on the iPhone version of Google Maps.

Is there some reason that this is the case? I don't know enough about mapping and phones to know if this is due to some technical limitation or not.

cwe• 14 years ago

That lackluster Google experience is exactly why Apple is building a replacement in-house. They are sick of dealing with Google undercutting them.

tonfa4• 14 years ago

> Is there some reason that this is the case?

The app is made by Apple, not Google, though it is using Google's API. So it isn't really "Google" Maps.

hej3• 14 years ago

I’m sure Apple would if the could. They obviously can’t, though. I can’t imagine that Google would allow them to implement those features. So Google is the holdup. Apple uses Google’s API and is completely dependent on them in what they can do. (Hey, that’s their right. No problem with that. You don’t have to allow your competitor everything.)

That is exactly the reason why Apple has to do it on their own. It might be worse than Google Maps (at least in the beginning or forever), but at least it will allow for progress.

pilom• 14 years ago

It used to be you could only get those features by purchasing Apples $50/year add on which included turn by turn and device locator functionality (parents could track children or you could catch a thief after your phone was stolen). Not sure if those are still options or not.

acomjean• 14 years ago

For turn by turn a lot os ios users use the Waze app. I've used it a fair bit and really like it.

_djo_3• 14 years ago

I fear that if true this might be a step backwards for users outside of the US, as Google has spent a massive amount of effort collecting Street View data from all over the world.

I highly doubt that Apple or the mapping companies it has acquired have quite the same coverage.

DeepDuh2• 14 years ago

As an iOS user from Europe I seriously hope they will do the transition gradually - e.g. first migrate only the US users, then country after country like they do with new iTunes content for example.

bad_user2• 14 years ago

The breadth and depth of Street View can be easily underestimated. They even have data for my town.

But more importantly, Street View is not as useful as having good and up to date maps. GMaps added the maps for my town much later, but now the maps have good coverage and are up to date. No other service is as good as GMaps for Europe, although Yahoo Maps was better for Europe a while back.

Another thing is turn by turn navigation. Google does have turn by turn navigation for my country, which is freaking awesome. Not only that but for my town they announced they are working on adding info on public transport routes.

And btw, when I'm saying "my town", I mean Bucharest, Romania, Eastern Europe. And I don't know how people cope with the above in other countries, but in Bucharest the data for turn by turn navigation and for the public transport routes has to be refreshed very often, so I'm sure it's a PITA doing this for so many countries.

_djo_3• 14 years ago

Exactly. Google mapped the major urban centres of South Africa, my country, before the 2010 Football World Cup, but since then they've been regularly refreshing the data and adding map and Street View data for even small towns in out of the way places. The coverage they have is phenomenal, especially considering the fact that S. Africa is hardly a major country.

nickpp2• 14 years ago

Google does NOT provide the maps data in Romania. Those maps are created by the public, unpaid volunteers, under onerous Terms and Conditions.

They should direct their efforts to Open Maps instead...

rkudeshi5• 14 years ago

If Apple does switch to their own maps, I'm sure Google will come out with their own independent Google Maps app in the App Store, like they have for Google+ and other products.

If nothing else, their database of businesses is hugely valuable and useful in its own app (it's what I use the Maps app for most and I don't think Apple will be able to fully replace it, at least not with the first iteration).

balac• 14 years ago

I wonder if that appstore version of Google Maps could be blocked under "duplication of functionality"?

talmand• 14 years ago

But doesn't Apple tend to reject apps that duplicate OS features? Or has that changed?

tonfa4• 14 years ago

> If Apple does switch to their own maps, I'm sure Google will come out with their own independent Google Maps app in the App Store, like they have for Google+ and other products.

I thought Apple does not allow apps competing with the "core" apps.

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

Is street view anything more than a fringe benefit? Google Maps got popular long before they had it. As long as you've got detailed street maps, ideally with actual stores and whatnot at their addresses, that should be enough to roll out.

_djo_3• 14 years ago

I've found it very useful on more than one occasion, but that's not why it's so important. Rather it's that as a result of their Street View mapping Google has developed an extremely accurate map database of even obscure corners of the world which in turn has allowed them to offer turn-by-turn navigation for those areas.

draven• 14 years ago

Anecdotal data point: I've just had a look at Street View to plan a short trip to a part of town I've never been before. I use it to look at complex crossroads where I need to take a turn so it will look familiar when I get there. I do not use a GPS for that kind of trips (it would be overkill.) So for me Street View is what makes google maps so useful.

abruzzi• 14 years ago

A map application by itself is certainly useful, but streetview provides certain benefits that a map alone doesn't provide. For my uses it is critical. Every year I take a 7 day vacation with my father on our motorcycles. Streetview allows me to gauge to scenic quality of the road, if the satellite quality is bad, it allows me to see if the road it paved. It allows me to find out if Folsom, Torreon, or Lukachukai and other tiny towns we pass through have a gas station. I don't know much about the 3D stuff apple is working on, but I have my doubts that it will be able to do the above in remote places. I'm sure it will still work well as a map, but streetview provides real benefits that cant really be gotten without driving the road.

smackfu4• 14 years ago

Street view or ISO (bird's eye) view are both indispensable to me, because they show store fronts instead of roofs. When I'm driving around, I can't see the roofs, so that does me no good.

antninja• 14 years ago

When I go to a job interview, I like to check what the street looks like and where is the entry of the building. It relieves some anxiety (although it didn't prevent me from getting completely lost once). Street view is one of the most useful features of online maps.

gruuk• 14 years ago

When we were looking to buy a house, Street View allowed us to see what the neighboring area looked like; listings rarely include details like "surrounded by three auto-repair shops" or "half of the houses on the block look abandoned".

minikomi• 14 years ago

Living in a country with no street numbers / very few road names... Yes.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

You may not realize it but you make one and possibly two assumptions with this statement, first that Apple isn't currently collecting equivalent street view data (Microsoft has done the same with their mapping product), and possibly two that the collection of the data for Apple would take as much time as it did for Google.

Sure there is the physical drive around stuff. But if you look at the C3 stuff (the company Apple bought that turns satellite images into 3D views) you can see where they might go with it. Also they do have a ton of cash and it would be seriously less than half a billion dollars to take a picture of the world. You might even get Toyota to make the 'steet view' edition version of the Prius in quantity.

The key thought for me here is that if this report is true, then Apple has decided mapping is strategic and taken it in house. And like Google (who did this in part so they could offer turn by turn directions [1]) they could exploit data they own for a wide variety of purposes.

[1] The original sources of Google's map information did not include a license to use it for turn by turn as that was exclusively given to another company by the vendor. Google had to acquire their own data without those restrictions in order to do navigation.

jeffpersonified• 14 years ago

Beyond pushing Google further out of their device and perhaps creating a more accurate mapping system, what do you think are the "strategic" points for bringing cartography in house? It's not like Apple would be interested in unmanned vehicle nav, or something... right?

I myself can't think of any strategic reasons beyond competition with Google.

jonknee• 14 years ago

3D is a cool demo, but turn by turn is actually useful. Let's hope Apple at least matches what Google Maps can do before switching for the sake of taking a jab.

swalsh• 14 years ago

Can I choose to use google maps if I wish? Or is that against apples command?

rkudeshi5• 14 years ago

Nothing stopping Google from publishing their own app in the App Store when this happens, much like how Bing has their own Maps app or Vimeo has an app even though YouTube is pre-installed on iOS.

In fact, that might even be better for Google. They've griped in the past about how Apple was slow to implement new features.

In particular, I know they hated the YouTube app (which Apple made). That's why the mobile site no longer redirects to the app - they wanted to be able to control the experience and iterate faster.

(I suspect the only reason Google hasn't terminated their agreement on the preinstalled apps already is because having YouTube and Google Maps on every single iOS device is worth more than fast integration of new features.)

chucknelson2• 14 years ago

How did this get on the front page of HN?

This is just another rumor speculating about things that were speculated on last month, and the month before that, etc. I guess I don't understand what makes this one so much more interesting or credible/worthy of much discussion.

Edit: Also, the link/headline is totally misleading. I'm sure others have said this too.

rkudeshi5• 14 years ago

Probably because it's the first to definitively say the new Maps are coming in iOS 6.

It's common knowledge that Apple has been buying maps companies to build their own app, but AFAIK this is the first time we've gotten a solid release date.

brk2• 14 years ago

How did this get on the front page of HN?

Hn is run on a software stack that allows a registered user to submit a link/URL to an item they determine to be of potential interest to the community.

After that link is submitted it appears on the listing of recently submitted articles at the /newest URL. Other users (with sufficient karma) that also find the link of value either upvote it, flag it, and/or comment on it.

As an item receives upvotes and/or comments an algorithm ranks it accordingly amongst other submitted stories, making it potentially visible on the "front page" of the site.

An items ranking is an overall generic indication that a sufficient number of users have found it noteworthy (or not).

It's all really pretty basic and uses a concept that has been around for about 7 or 8 years now. However this "how did this item get to the front page..." question seems to come up with enough frequency that an answer should be more easy to find, or maybe even be emailed to all new accounts so that people will not need to ask these sorts of questions amongst discussions of the article itself.

stanleydrew2• 14 years ago

I am reasonably certain that chucknelson is aware of the technical way a story makes it to the front page. His question then should be read as "how has a sufficient number of users found this noteworthy?"

kingkilr• 14 years ago

I accidentally upvoted you, so I figured I should leave a comment explaining why I intended to downvote you: you either failed to understand the question, or chose to intentionally provide a useless and snarky answer. The GP was asking a social question about how the HN userbase had changed such that a rumor like this made the site.

there• 14 years ago

Do you know what the word rhetorical means?

danso• 14 years ago

Out-of-context excerpt: Technology behind Apple's new iPhone mapping system "based on de-classified missile target algorithms" developed by former "aerospace and defense company"

Linkbait-conspiracy-tech-blog-post in 3...2...1

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

Lot's of tech in any smartphone (not just Siri) comes from military offshoots.

protomyth• 14 years ago

Apple acquired Placebase in 2009, Poly9 in 2010, and C3 Technologies in 2011. I cannot imagine not replacing a 3rd party product when a company buy 3 companies for the same product, particularly if the 3rd party product is owned by a competitor.

mxfh• 14 years ago

That right mockup view comes apparently from a screenshot of Nokia Maps 3D, even down to the old Nokia font and label Coloring:

http://maps.nokia.com/37.7976001,-122.3979938,17.42,195.29,7... (requires Plugin)

WebGL Version: http://maps.nokia.com/webgl/#|37.7976|-122.3979938|0|900|70|...

asdfdsa12342• 14 years ago

I have been delayed by Google Maps mistakes several times, and I don't even use it often. The error rate is ridiculous. I would love for Apple to come up with a superior product.

statictype• 14 years ago

I've found Google Maps to be great for spanning long distance but poor at navigating individual streets. I've been burned many times by landmarks and locations being no where near where it shows on the map (I live in India - your milage may vary).

That said, Google's been doing this for years and this is kind of the thing that they would be very good at (making sense out of a large corpus of data quickly). I'd be very surprised if Apple's new maps were as good out the door (let alone better).

asdfdsa12342• 14 years ago

This fits my experience as well--long distances are fine, but closer in it's unreliable. No doubt this is not an easy task and I have to agree that Apple faces an uphill fight here.

destraynor• 14 years ago

This kind of thing is inevitable.

"We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make. We participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution." – Tim Cook on Apple's philosophy.

(full text here: http://destraynor.com/cook/)

philp• 14 years ago

Coming from Android what I'm really missing — and was hoping to get out of the numerous geo related Apple acquisitions — is a proper competitor to Google's in-house navigation software. The GPS software integrated with iOS is an atrocity compared to what you get with Gingerbread(?) and higher.

Seeing that smartphones are increasingly replacing standalone consumer GPS solutions, I think its fair to say that Apple dropped the ball on this one. Maybe I'm jaded but who cares about 3D pictures when what I really want is a solution to get from A to B?

surferbayarea• 14 years ago

Cool! I've lost some love for google maps since they started showing the sponsored link as the first result. What was before a one search, one click activity is now one search, zoom to distinguish between the sponsored and real listing(often close by), then click. Pain!

heed• 14 years ago

Just so it's clear I want to point out that the current Maps app isn't a Google developed app. The only part that is Google is the map data and base map, everything else is Apple tech.

shinratdr3• 14 years ago

As someone who uses public transit, I couldn't care less about turn by turn or voice nav. All I want from iOS 6 Maps.app is alternate transit routes. As much as I agree with Apple's move from a srratigic standpoint, as a user I'm worried about possible regressions.

I hope they choose to release it only for the iPad or iPod touch to gauge reaction before releasing it to iPhone users. I think the average usage of those products would allow a pretty Maps app that still needs fleshing out, whereas I need my phone maps app to be reliable over all else.

Apple to drop Google Maps in iOS 6 for in-house Maps?

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