iOS 6 Maps App. Flop or Not?

It has been just over a week since Apple released iOS6, which has given me some time to play around with the new features. So far, I really love the changes, but I have heard the scuttlebutt about the new Maps app. For those of you that haven’t heard or haven’t experienced it yet, the new Maps app can in some cases be dramatically incorrect. While I can brush off some cases as just being user ignorance — like asking where London is and getting a result for London, Ontario rather than London England — if you aren’t specific, don’t get mad when you don’t get exactly what you want.

I have seen pictures on a tumblr feed entitled The Amazing iOS 6 Maps that show graphical errors like the green grass textures where a parking lot should be and other errors that show landmarks miles away from their actual location. Yes, this annoying and unlike Apple to ship a product that isn’t perfect, but it does have some nice features that you didn’t get with the old Maps app.

For example, I was zooming in and all of a sudden, I rotated the whole map. Call me easily impressed, but I thought that was the bees knees. Sure, all you had to do before was spin your phone around, but now all the UI elements stay in a readable orientation. Also, now my phone will tell me audibly where I am going so I don’t need to be looking down and playing with my phone to figure out what I’m doing when. Turn-by-turn navigation is a nice safety feature to make the Maps app more like a GPS. (Yes, it might take you to the completely wrong place, but you will get there without having to fiddle with your phone!) Because Google Maps doesn’t allow for turn-by-turn, that was the single-biggest reason for Apple to develop something internally.

If we take a little stroll down memory lane, I can tell you that Google (the original engine of the iOS maps) started development way back in 2004 with Google Local. This eventually was merged into Google Maps and officially launched in 2005. That gave Google 8 years to develop and perfect a system. I would certainly hope that with an 8-year development cycle, you would have a product as perfect as Google Maps. So what if the iOS 6 Maps app has some inconsistencies — have we all become so dependent on technology that we have no more intuition? Frankly, I have never 100% trusted anything, except for the adage that one should never follow anything blindly otherwise you won’t know where you are or how you got there (literally).

The bottom line is that this app is new to Apple, and it is something that will be fixed. As Jobs said back in 2010 with that whole iPhone 4 antenna issue, “We’re (Apple) not perfect. Phones aren’t perfect. We want to make all our users happy.” We don’t think that Apple is just sticking their head in the sand and ignoring these issues, so I am confident that Apple will have a fix for this and they will launch it when they have it. As Mr.Incredible once said, “We’ll get there when we get there!” In the meantime, if I need to figure out how to get somewhere, I will use the app and take it with a grain of salt — i.e. a paper map in my glove box in case of emergencies.