I, like many others, was long ago and firmly disappointed with Apple Maps and put this app in a distant folder on my iPhone. The reasons for this disappointment are completely unoriginal, same as everyone’s — takes you to the wrong place, works strangely and even if it leads where needed, does it in far from the best way. However, with the release of iOS 9 with new, improved navigation, I decided to give it another chance. Besides wanting to see what Apple now has with maps/navigation, I was curious to try the integration with Apple Watch and voice control.
Let’s start with the good news — this navigation looks very “cozy”, like in old hardware navigators. No nonsense gets in the way of seeing the road, nothing distracts, everything is extremely laconic. A quick glance at the screen is enough to understand where we’re going and where to turn.
More good news — it finally learned to somehow understand traffic. That is, even before it knew something and calculated time depending on road congestion, but it didn’t have the brains to reroute. Now it supposedly should have enough. With this “supposedly” begins the list of not-so-good news.
I drove to work using Apple Maps and hit a pretty serious traffic jam. The navigation had no knowledge of this jam and offered me nothing. Google maps running in parallel showed everything correctly in red and after a couple of miles suggested an alternative route. And the new Apple one continued to cheerfully lead me into the jam.
The second, and much more serious problem for me, is that Apple Maps knows absolutely nothing about lanes and doesn’t offer help with lane changes. Where normal navigation would draw which lane to get in and prompt you by voice, maps will draw a turn and tell you when to prepare for it. This is enough when I roughly know the road, but for complex interchanges when you need to get in a specific lane in advance, well that’s definitely not our way. The absence of such lane-change assistance is even strange against the background that similar functionality exists in all other navigation apps on my iPhone.
As for watch integration — it’s some kind of disgrace. Theoretically it should show a piece of the map on the watch and warn about maneuvers in time. In practice I almost never managed to see such a picture. It simply didn’t have time to draw the map and all I saw was a checkered screen with a car dot. I don’t understand what the problem is there, but it’s undoubtedly present. Regarding warning with a “tap” on the arm and sound signal — it almost works. Most of these warnings were on time, but a couple of times it was late by several seconds.
Another completely surprising problem is related to partial loss of Wi-Fi. When I get in the car where the signal from home barely reaches, Apple Maps literally goes crazy. On a navigation request it thinks for a long time and then says it’s unable to build a route. I have to first drive away from home so that it completely loses the signal, and only then ask Siri to build a route. With this (voice control) also not everything is so simple. Some names and names from my address book it perceives correctly, but some, for example “home” it simply refuses to understand. Not sure why it doesn’t like “home” so much, looks all correct and should work.
By the way, I expected that in Chicago it would draw its fancy 3D pictures of the surroundings, but nothing like that happened. Maybe it doesn’t know Chicago (which would be strange), or maybe another glitch.
On the way back from work I drove using my usual Google navigation, and apple maps was safely sent to that distant folder from which I pulled it out. Let’s see what happens in the next version, but so far this is a quite limited program, with significant problems and shortcomings. Unfortunately, the laconicism of the appearance is combined with simply indecent, in 2015, minimalism of functionality.
This post was translated from the Russian original with AI assistance and reviewed by a human.