Launching a web app that doesn't work on the web? I guess that's what we should expect from a company that makes a messaging app that magically only works on one piece of hardware. Apple has a knack for finding restrictions where they would otherwise never exist.
Assuming you're referring to the fact that it doesn't work on all browsers, it's literally a beta.
It clearly states that it's for Chrome/Edge/Safari only, and not for mobile. But it also says at the bottom:
> Support for additional languages, browsers, and platforms will be expanded over time.
I think it's totally fair that a beta has support for limited browsers, in order to get it out faster. Just like it's only in English for now as well, although that will obviously expand too.
If it's not available for Firefox or Android when it leaves beta, then yes it's a problem. But an English-only beta with limited compatibility is one of the things betas are for. It's an appropriate setting of expectations.
From first-hand experience, I've seen it happen in SaaS orgs with (diplomatically speaking) "unsophisticated-but-confident" userbases seeking to reduce support-costs. The kind of SaaS where the paying customer is a business - and where the users' eyes glaze-over any warning banner or message but eagerly call the SaaS support number for entirely unrelated issues with Outlook; so outright blocking unsupported browsers/clients reduces the support burden.
(I'm not defending this practice; I'm strongly opposed to it)
----
Another (also, unfortunately, from first-hand experience) reason is a (very) non-technical project leader will write up a (semi-reasonable) brief Jira ticket like "Our SaaS product doesn't work in Firefox; until we invest in supporting Firefox we'll just direct users to use a supported browser" - but the ticket gets assigned to a particular kind of remote contractor SWE who never challenges higher-ups or says "this is a bad idea" - who'll interpret the part about "we'll direct users to use a supported browser" as "block unsupported browsers".
Because they're probably not undergoing a formal QA process yet and Apple doesn't want to deal with bug reports and bad press about how its beta is janky/buggy/sucky in other browsers. This is pretty standard stuff for webapps doing a phased rollout of browsers -- it's not anything unique to Apple.
Just because people in this thread have found workarounds to get it to launch in Firefox doesn't mean there aren't still a bunch of bugs there, that Apple is aware of but doesn't want marring the user experience yet.
It's more about Apple's rotten philosophy and hubris. Like how they pit teens against each other by artificially restricting their proprietary messaging system.
It's about the attitude. WE (Apple) gets to decide what how and where you use our products and services that you pay for. YOU (the paying user) will do as we say.
Also, what is with the fanboy defense of the richest corporation in the world? If they want to defend their shitty sales tactics they can afford to pay for it.
Literally every software developer makes decisions about what platforms to support and not, and when. This is not an Apple thing.
Also:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
Not super impressed. It has the same problem as Google in that street names are displayed much too sparsely, making it hard to orient yourself. Additionally, the satellite view is too dark, at least in my area.
The imagery looks clean but the minimum altitude is much higher than what Google offers, so it's hard to evaluate. (Helpful tip to mapping providers: you don't need more resolution, just let me zoom in on your existing imagery! There is no reason whatsoever to stop at 1:1.)
No street-view functionality appears to be present. Not sure if it's supposed to be, but it's certainly a dealbreaker if not.
And then, yes, there's the matter of failing to support commonly-used browsers, even though it works fine in those browsers when appending a bogus subdirectory name as someone else pointed out.
Bottom line, if there's any reason to use this over Google Maps I'm not seeing it.
What is it with Google Maps refusing to show me the street name I'm zooming in on? It feels like they make it especially sparse on streets your route line uses!
At this point I have to assume somebody has a blocking patent that is keeping the major players from doing the obvious right thing. Otherwise it's utterly inexplicable how street names are handled.
Sure, but when there are no businesses or other tags around, they need to label the streets.
This is just stupid: https://i.imgur.com/VpEvREN.png Some of the most significant streets have no labels, and good luck reading the ones that are there.
Amusingly does not work for safari on iPhone. Ok ok I have the maps app and that’s what they want me to use but if I am on mobile now and I want to click to check it out right now… well, maybe I won’t come back to try it later, guys??
Feels a little like they rushed it to meet some Q3 launch timeline?
It's a beta that is.... approximately 19 years behind the competition.
A beta that is kinda embarrassingly less cooked than multiple commercial and open source offerings which, mysteriously, provided both desktop and mobile web versions without fuss on effectively day one.
It screams that Apple has under invested in this solution.
This is more of an alpha released to the public. If they consider lack of mobile browser support feature complete (the industry standard state before beta), they are in deep shit.
Exactly who is Apple “competing with”? You might as well say they are 19 years behind in creating a search engine. It’s something they just didn’t care about doing until now.
They provided both desktop and mobile web versions on day one... this is a beta. This is NOT day one. I'm betting that the other offerings you provided had similar restrictions while they were still in beta, but you don't know that because you're comparing a BETA product to a final product.
What is it about Apple that brings out the most shrill and uninformed opinions, even on a website that skews toward software developers?
HN only gets about 5M unique users out of the 5.44B on the internet. Usage of the site is < .1%. It's hard for me to accept that, but by your logic it is basically extinct now. It's time to move on. /s
Apple has a very short list of allowed browsers that does not include any Android browser, any Linux browser, or Firefox on any platform: https://support.apple.com/120585
If you try to access Apple Maps on an unsupported browser, you get a hard "Your current browser isn't supported" block, presumably implemented with UA detection.
Their devs are probably trying to make sure it runs in Firefox but they haven't added it to the official QA process, just like they haven't added languages other than English either. And they don't want Firefox users complaining about bugs that might be there yet.
If this were a full release then sure I'd complain too. But this is just a beta. Maybe releasing betas before they have full compatibility and internationalization is good, rather than "miserable"?
Sorry but have you ever developed software before? I’m sure you have. You’re just refusing to draw from your professional expertise. Rather, you’re drawing from the “uninformed member of the Apple hater peanut gallery” part of your brain.
You wouldn’t have given this a second of extra thought if it wasn’t done by a company you’ve obviously long-since decided that you hate for cultural reasons.
It being in "beta" is a perfect reason to excuse bugs if it doesn't work in Firefox. But, they went out of their way to build in a system to say "go away" if you're not using Chrome.
That’s not what beta means. Why would I put something out there for beta testing externally that I haven’t done any internally testing for? Any feedback would just generate noise and issues that I already know about
I love this web oriented develop once and run everywhere magic, that is exactly like that, it's a kind of magic that is not the reality, works in some theaters only.
For goodness sake. Be an adult. Cross-browser comparability is a known, material aspect of front-end web development. You know this. “It’s within reason for Apple to whitelist user agents for a beta release” isn’t the same as being an apologist and blaming the user. It’s a statement of fact. Insufferable.
And if Apple can't figure out "front-end web development" then they do not deserve anyone defending them. Especially not with grotesque cult-like enthusiasm.
I just tried it on Firefox with https://beta.maps.apple.com/abc, and all the POIs are incorrectly placed (at least in South Africa) and the roads are right-angled and un-named.
Also, Apple makes an absolute mess when contributing to the OpenStreetMap project. For example, their contributors make any informal / illegal shortcut part of a residential street when it isn't.
According to the linked support page, nothing except Apple OSes and Windows is supported; not even desktop Linux! That's quite an accomplishment in 2024. They really went above and beyond in not supporting any modern browser.
Interestingly that /abc link works for me on Linux (Brave), but the published link doesn't work for me on Linux+any browser, Chrome included.
Agreed, quite annoying. I own a bunch of Apple stuff, but when they do this crap i can't invest further into their ecosystem because it's unusable to me much of the time.
> Also, Apple makes an absolute mess when contributing to the OpenStreetMap project. For example, their contributors make any informal / illegal shortcut part of a residential street when it isn't.
This would be very bad, where are you getting this from? That their own maps implementation doesn't work outside of Chrome/Safari doesn't sound nearly as bad as if they're damaging an entire ecosystem like that.
I contribute to OSM, and I've seen it in my own local town. It's not so much nefarious as it is negligent. They don't have local knowledge, see a satellite image of what seems like a road and decide it connects to existing residential roads. If you spend time on it, you'll notice it too as it was common enough for me to notice it.
I found this after scrolling through the linked GitHub issues where they overwrite local surveyed data with an interpretation based on satellite imagery: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/109846534
Firefox on Ubuntu works on my machine, but only using your link, and it displays "[App.AppleMaps.Title]" as the tabs title. The POIs seem to be correct in Switzerland.
Despite preferring Apple's ecosystem over all others, I've built up quite a robust collection of "Favorites" and "Want to Go" and 'Starred" places in Google Maps, which makes the switching costs to move to Apple Maps high.
Is there a way to export that data from Google Maps? Will Apple offer an import feature?
I accumulated 8,000+ visited locations on Google Maps, but they've been increasingly abandoning "power users".
You might want to reconsider before "investing" or being emotionally attached to Google Maps's saved lists:
Sharing some perspective on this (I was involved in the fix).
Basically what started happening at some point was that Maps had built in a “timeout” for the fetch of Saved lists. When the lists weren’t able to be downloaded/fetched in under X seconds, the system stopped trying, assuming that lists in general would always load in under X seconds.
For users with huge lists, and for some users with very slow connections, it would timeout and not show anything. The way to notice it was typically when sharing the list, because the receiving user would fall into that timeout trap. The owner of the list usually didn’t notice immediately because the places were cached on their devices.
It’s still being worked on, and being rolled out slowly.. Some changes will come though, not sure how it’ll be announced.
It is someone's quarterly performance review and OKR to improve SLO. One such SLO is average load time. If you set such metrics as a goal, and financially reward people to do it, it's easy to meet the goal: arbitrary prune out the long tail, especially if the distribution of saved locations per user follows an Pareto/power law distribution.
They've since rolled back that experiment of payload sized limit, and instead used this number based limit. I guess it makes more a cleaner explainaton and internal documentation from a product sense this way as opposed to an arbitrary engineering limit.
The issue is still apathy and laziness from the engineers... they can have this per-request limits, but cache previously loaded pinnned locations, then incrementally append more to the list on subsequent requests. Instead, they attempt to reload the source of truth from the server everytime. There is a specific behavior where I see this is the case: they will load 3,000, you add another location which is now 3,001 locally, but after a few minutes they reconcile with the server and your local machine is back to 3,000. This is especially ironically considering the Google interview's emphasis on Dynamic Programming and building up a larger solution from previous solutions...
On Desktop, you can still load all your locations. There is some weird and intuitive behavior here how they reconcile edits to existing pin. The caveat on Desktop is that they will entire to render entire regions when there is too much (somewhere in the vicinity above 3,000 but below 8,000). I've noticed in recent weeks they've rolled out a quadtree
implementation where in a given rectangular region, they'd limit and cap how much saved locations they attempt to render, versus before where it would be seemingly depth-first until they reach the 3,000 limit.
That change is hilarious. So many potentially goofy reasons for it happening but my best take is google deciding not to host any data it can’t mine or use. The privacy policy on location history was quite good and effectively granted users privacy.
If they cared about privacy they could have easily hosted the data encrypted with a key only known to the user rendering subpoenas useless for that service.
Or they could just not upload it. No one trusts E2EE systems; you can see Apple tries it and everyone just accuses them of putting secret backdoors in.
Only through Google Takeout. I am trying to build a tool that allows displaying and sharing them outside of Google Accounts or Maps, but the only reliable way to get them out is unfortunately still Takeout. Some browser extensions offered a loop/extraction but they mostly don’t work anymore I think.
Google Takeout is excellent; basically GDPR data downloads 5 years before GDPR was even a thing. Before moving anything to Apple Maps I'd want to be sure they offer a similar feature so I'm not locked in.
Collectively there are 100s of strings open across Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc asking for a clean way to export saved places on Google Maps, but other than Takeout (which for the average user is quite complex), there isn't really anything that works well.
There's ways to hack together a scraper that can go through and grab everything, but it's still quite messy. I think Google is making it hard on purpose in order to use this as their "moat".
I use Apple Maps for all of my transit needs, but I still keep Google for business data and lists like this. I don't find the Apple Maps list set-up to be what I want from this kind of feature. I do find it reasonable to keep two maps apps on my home screen, though.
If you use your mapping app to curate locations, just don’t bother with Apple Maps. It’s pretty great for navigation and turn by turn and offline. But its review ecosystem is Yelp and TripArvisor (so terrible) instead of GM’s great user reviews, you cannot collaborate on collections of locations, managing saved locations works terrible.
I love Apple Maps and use it every day in NYC. Hope they will make it require a slightly longer press to drop a pin. I can't be the only user accidentally doing this ~a dozen times a week. Happened just now in the browser, trying to drag the view. Rooting for the product.
Is a map without transit even a map? I still use Google Maps as my default for transit, but Citymapper is considerably more reliable and I've been trying to remember to use it more.
A problem I had with CityMapper is that at the time I last used it, it used the distance units of the city you’re in, with no ability to change it. For example, if you’re in New York, the distances will be in feet, and feet only.
Since I already know the public transport of my my own city and that I reach out for CityMapper when I’m travelling, it’s a jarring omission. I was incredulous enough to check with support, and sure enough they confirmed as of last year at least it is indeed the case that the units cannot be changed.
That's a pretty big oversight on their part. But when I'm in a tight spot (like train service is ending late at night) I've had CityMapper save my ass a few times when Google was showing me inaccurate information. This has mostly been in NYC and London.
After the initial gaffes, I was reluctant to use it and stayed with Google Maps for a long time. But a couple years ago someone mentioned it had improved, and I'd already been trying to gain some distance from Google... and it's pretty usable. I'll just remember to be a little skeptical if it tells me to drive across the Australian desert.
If you have a link to maps.apple.com on a platform with app links (or claimed HTTPS URLs on android platforms), a native Apple Maps app can display the results. Otherwise, they haven't had a web version, so they would change it to a redirect to Google Maps.
I can't speak as to whether Chrome or Firefox on Mac, or alternate browsers on iOS, support this OS feature to launch native apps which have claimed a URL path.
The defacto query parameters from Google Maps (at least historically) are supported by Apple Maps as well.
This made migration to Apple Maps easy when it launched - you can just change the domain in the URL and prefer the native experience, knowing it will fall back to Google Maps in other cases.
Once Apple's web experience is finished, I imagine they will stop redirecting to Google Maps. Google has somewhat compromised the privacy posture of Google Maps, which may very well be how Apple internally justified building a web experience.
I checked with curl and no matter the user agent it will answer with a 302 to google maps, I don't know how it works that others say it will redirect them to the Apple Maps App.
Yeah what it's showing is that on iOS/Safari (user agent) it returns a maps:// protocol address. This makes sense of all the reports here - it's trying to direct you to whatever maps app you've selected. Redirecting to google maps makes sense if the server doesn't think the maps:// result will do that.
On one hand, this is a beta product, so perhaps understandable that they're not supporting all platforms out of the gate.
On the other hand, if you're serious about getting your application tested, people running open source browsers and operating systems are going to provide the most thorough testing and detailed problem reports.
Why would I want to be bombarded with problem reports on items that I could find myself once I add it to my testing matrix? Beta testing is to suss out bugs that my internal testers haven’t caught.
People are so use to Google’s bastardizing the term “beta” that they forgot what beta testing traditionally is
Even for a beta this is clunky and practically unusable compared to Google Maps. It's pretty obvious that Apple still has a very long way to go to offer a competitive maps product. Google is just so far ahead of whatever this beta is.
For example, I centered the map on my location in Los Angeles, CA and then clicked search for "Gas Stations", and it promptly reposition the map and gave me all the gas stations in San Jose, CA, a city hundreds of miles away. WTF? This is probably one of the most common use cases and they can't get it right.
I managed to drop a pin somehow, not sure, and now I can't remove it and the map is stuck focusing on this random pin point. I don't see any UI for removing the dropped pin. I can't move the pin, or do anything to change where the pin is. Ugh.
> For example, I centered the map on my location in Los Angeles, CA and then clicked search for "Gas Stations", and it promptly reposition the map and gave me all the gas stations in San Jose, CA, a city hundreds of miles away. WTF?
I'm not seeing that behavior at all. When I type gas stations in search, it adds a 'nearby'. It will slightly reposition the window if there are matches on the edges, and the search goes into the history with the closest local area (e.g. the suburb I'm centered over).
It is an active beta though, so I suppose it could differ browser by browser, day by day.
>For example, I centered the map on my location in Los Angeles, CA and then clicked search for "Gas Stations", and it promptly reposition the map and gave me all the gas stations in San Jose, CA, a city hundreds of miles away. WTF? This is probably one of the most common use cases and they can't get it right.
This happens all the time in the official iOS app. If you search for a local restaurant that's not in their database, they send you to the closest sounding one even if its on the other side of the planet.
Firefox isn't a supported browser. Android isn't supported at all. I'm not even sure how you manage to find yourself in a situation where that can even happen.
It's not as though they're doing anything that you can't get from open street maps, mapbox, Google, Amazon, or any of the numerous NPM packages which do maps. It's not 2005, having so many compat bugs is just embarrassing.
Are you genuinely confused that Apple didn’t prioritize support on Android and on #3 (4?) browser? Or are you just disappointed, but expressing it as bewildernent?
I'm saying that in the year of our lord 2024 (with arguably the best browser compatibility we've ever had) they managed to—against all odds—build a website which doesn't work on the most popular mobile operating system in the world and the second most popular rendering engine in the world.
“Not prioritizing support” is a nice euphemism for explicitly blocking it. They could have just left it alone or added a dismissible banner saying “this browser isn’t supported, don’t report any bugs you find, we don’t care”, but they went out of their way to prevent you from accessing it.
Competent web development has usually been associated with standards compliant sites that work everywhere.
In 2024 its weird that someone who isn't a moron manages to break the web. One would assume this is deliberate to retain some competitive edge. If so why bother a map product that doesn't work where I need it 99% of the time is completely useless. They might as well have retained more advantage yet by making it mac safari only.
Yes because I’m sure that Apple is really worried about competition from Firefox. No serious web developer thinks that you don’t have to test and special case for different browsers.
I never understood the value proposition of Apple Maps. Can you imagine being the executive, deciding to create Apple Maps? "Ok, how much does it cost to build and maintain? $BIG NUMBER. What? No way. We'll never make it back by selling adverts on the map." And, still, they built it. We have heard many times on HN that Google Maps (virtually) throws money out the window to keep it running so smoothly. Just keeping all the transit info correct for suggesting routes must be a nightmare.
Maps is table stakes for a smartphone, and having such a key feature provided by your main competitor is a huge risk. So purely on that basis, it could be worth it.
Then, on top of that, there is value in the data you're able to collect. Traffic data is really valuable. Tracking the movement of vehicles and pedestrians lets you create very accurate maps based on "real world" data, you could use it to figure out really specific things like traffic light timings, diversions, pedestrian crossings, parking space, layout of private roads...
At one point, Apple was working on a car, if you were making a self driving car, all that data would be useful for you, and beacuse of the value of it, competitors may not even sell it to you. So your only option is to generate it yourself.
As for transit data, that is fairly simple, most transit agencies will publish their timetables in GTFS format, there are tools to automatically export this in scheduling software. That will probably get your 90% of the way there, so you might have a few on the groud people in major cities to tweak and make it more accurate, which is nothing for a company on the scale of Apple.
Back in the days Google notoriously launched turn-by-turn navigation on Android only. They bet on this being a big enough differentiator for people to use Android over iPhones.
Apple then launched Apple maps - which at some point became quite good. Google quickly learned that they can't afford to make Android specific features in their apps or they risk losing large percentage of iOS users if Apple makes a competing product
If Apple didn't respond with making their own maps, then maybe we would see more and more Android specific features, to the point where Android would become the dominating platform
But this is also exactly the same game Apple plays against Android users. It's the same reason why iMessage bubbles are green for Android. Google won the maps round, but such wins are vanishingly rare against Apple.
There are non-Android devices that can send texts as well; they also appear as green. It's probably more accurate to say that encrypted messages are blue and unencrypted are green. Look at the recent AT&T hack to see why the difference matters.
Even if that was more accurate (I don't think it is), it's certainly not the way users see it.
In fact that's NOT the way Apple describes it, either (see the Apple article cited above), because Apple doesn't actually want to enable E2EE -- it only wants to be able to say it offers it.
In practice, ensuring that other users are pressured into choosing iMessage on iPhone is the only thing that matters to Apple.
And, this very simple trick works extremely well: at least 87% of teenagers in the U.S. (https://mashable.com/article/apple-messages-green-doj) are pre-programmed to buy an iPhone, even though they have the lowest disposable income of all. Meanwhile, less than a third of the overall global population owns an iPhone.
Is that because iPhones are better? As an owner of both a recent Pro Max and Pixel Pro, I can unequivocally answer, "no", but I do find all of the annoyances between cross-device communication accrue to the point of just wanting to switch to my iPhone full-time, even though it's arguably a worse experience in many ways.
and services like e.g. SMS text reminders from Internet services do no run on Android. The green is not a signifier of Android, just of non-encrypted. Or non-Apple, if you want to be less precise. (Apple devices where encryption is disabled also appear as green.)
> Then, on top of that, there is value in the data you're able to collect. Traffic data is really valuable. Tracking the movement of vehicles and pedestrians [...]
...but then they decided to market themselves as "privacy-focused", so they can't really do that, right? Or are they actually doing it?
> At one point, Apple was working on a car
...but then they killed the car project, so that goes out of the window too.
Collecting dots/vectors on a map doesn't necessarily invade my privacy. The problem comes with linking that dot with a person. As long as that link is lost and unrecoverable, I have no problem with Apple (or anyone) collecting it. The second problem is actually ensuring that.
The main problem with this is that the data is naturally linked to your phone, and you have to trust the provider to anonymize it. I suspect that's at least part of the reason for Apple painting itself as privacy-friendly: building trust with its users that they won't misuse their data.
I mean most of those vectors will converge on my home dot; with time data any vector intersecting with my home can tell a lot about my life. Additionally, is it anonymized per user (ie all my vectors are still a set just not identified as me) or each vector is an individual product unliked from all other vectors and user data.
> Additionally, when you use Maps to make a navigation or directions request, details about your route are sent to Apple, including:
> [...]
> A random identifier, which is created when you ask for directions and exists for the duration of your navigation session
That’s just because your phone sends it, but your phone also has a list of “significant locations,” around which it could avoid sending data for a mile or less.
> but then they decided to market themselves as "privacy-focused", so they can't really do that, right? Or are they actually doing it?
Here's the genius behind Apple's marketing: when they say "privacy" they (mostly) don't mean from them! They are mainly talking about third parties. Apple collects a ton of first-party data, and nobody seems to be concerned about that. I also the pond Apple swims in (big tech) is so disgusting and polluted that even their minor effort at cleanliness seems pretty good.
Apple has a lot of technical solutions that mean data is collected, but is never associated with a particular user.
As an example, location data is shared with Apple, but it’s associated with a random unique identifier rather than your account. When your trip ends, your device switches to a new identifier. Traffic information is only shared if a certain threshold of users travel on a route [1].
Other examples include the entirely on-device photo scanning, the same rotating identifier system for transcripts of Siri interactions, etc. and, of course, being the only major cloud provider to offer E2EE on everything.
Not perfect, but a huge difference from their competitors.
I do appreciate their sharing that, but I hate that it requires entirely just trusting them. They've so locked the user out of the device that it's difficult or impossible to verify anything for yourself, and even if you did, they could trivially push a change at any time because they have ultimate control over the device.
On the flip side, I tend to think a company so large would have at least one whistleblower or something on the inside, and/or would be so concerned about legal fallout that they wouldn't risk it.
On the flip side of the flip side, Apple is notoriously secretive (even among insiders) and very tight-fisted around employees sharing/leaking information. They also have some of the best lawyers in the world and a near infinite ability to fund any legal action, so may feel (and in fact, be) untouchable. And should Apple go evil, there aren't really great alternatives anyway for the average person, and they're generally so invested in the walled garden that walking away would entail a major disruption to their life.
I agree though, while not perfect, they are certainly much better than their competitors (not counting small players, e.g. GrapheneOS), and I'm grateful that at least they keep privacy at the forefront of conversation. If they abandoned it, there'd be nobody to pick up the mantle.
Allegedly, Apple have built in privacy features so they can't associate individual users with routes, or know what the entire route is[1]. Apple does show traffic data in the app, so they obviously do collect the data somehow.
When Apple built maps, the car project was still alive, so it would have been a factor in deciding on the investment. They could still partner with a car manufacturer and use the data.
I do suspect that my first point was key in green lighting Apple Maps. Google could have asked for more and more money to provide maps for Apple, or they could pull out completely, and force users to use the App Store app, which would have left the product direction of Maps completely out of Apple's hands.
I haven't been an employee since 2015, but by then Google had already been doing the route trimming and splicing for live traffic data. (If you had location history enabled, some of that same data at lower granularity was stored in another service, of course)
"Is it Apple Maps bad?" --Gavin Belson, Silicon Valley
After the fiasco from their initial app launch, I'm sure they would have preferred not to be a meme in a sitcom if possible on this go round. It is possible to release too early
The Maps application on iOS used to use Google Maps. But then Google started to collect too much user data and withholding features like turn-by-turn navigation (while making it available on Android).
It's defensive, (and it was built at a time when money was free).
The iPhone launched with Google Maps. Then Google decided to push feature updates skewed towards android phones, leaving iPhone users behind. Apple saw that a vendor could screw their users over (and potentially cause defectors), and decided to invest to ensure they don't have a dependancy.
The best part is that they can now offer it to App Store developers as a free iOS SDK (and paid API on web). Meanwhile the same developers would have to pay an exorbitant cost to use Google Maps. It's part of the moat that makes iOS the more profitable platform to develop for. You can also see this playbook with the release of free Weather APIs.
Yea Apple/Google maps has to be expensive to build and maintain, but at least for apple, they were able to buy their way to bootstrapping the map. What's impressed me is all the fly-over and custom 3D modeling they've done. It does really feel like they just wanted to make a good map at some point, even beyond what people needed or expected. That said, mapping products probably has good caching and fault tolerance you can design in to reduce cost - maps don't go out of sync that fast (for caching) and you'd never know if their "suggested routes" data was out of date occasionally, because you can never drive both routes at once.
At the time, Google Maps on iOS was written by Apple, not Google, and Google was holding back API access for Street View until Apple sent back more location/tracking/demographic data on users that Google wanted.
Rather than sell out their users, Apple dropped Google Maps as the backend and launched their own maps, and then let Google write their own Maps app where they could do anything they wanted.
> The best part is that they can now offer it to App Store developers as a free SDK. Meanwhile the same developers would have to pay an exorbitant cost to use Google Maps.
Apple Mapkit is free up to 25K api call a day, after that you have to contact Apple for more (and pay I guess?).
At the time Apple Maps came out, Google Maps on iOS was limited to bitmap tiles and had no turn by turn directions, whereas Google Maps on Android had both dynamic vector based maps and turn by turn directions.
Apple Maps forced Google to improve Google Maps on iOS.
Apple Maps data was definitely substandard when it was released, but it has improved considerably since then. I vastly prefer it to Google Maps, especially for turn by turn directions when I'm driving.
Privacy and a vastly better navigation experience is what makes me prefer Apple Maps for turn by turn nav. For finding local businesses Google Maps is better
> I never understood the value proposition of Apple Maps.
They ship their operating systems with all the "common" apps pre-installed (e.g.: Email, Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Maps, etc). For the maps to work, they need some data source. That's what Apple Maps is.
Apple doesn't make money with the Email app directly, but its existence likely improves how users perceive iOS. This probably translates to return customers and more people recommending it.
On iPhone I only see Signifcant Locations; on my phone I only see a list of 3 places (despite 400 records). Compared to Google Timeline it’s much more curtailed function.
Yeah, it's a feature enabled by default outside of the EU (in the EU it asks you if you want to enable it). Makes for some fun stats/recaps, and is useful for tracing back steps (wait, where was that awesome store/restaurant/park/whatever we went to while on a trip to XYZ?) at the expense of Google knowing a lot about you.
Maps are core technology, which Apple prefers to own. Imagine wanting to release CarPlay (or a full blown car) and Google having you by the balls over maps and navigation. That wouldn't be a good situation. As to $BIG_NUMBER, they seem to be managing fine - Maps sucked pretty bad when it came out, but it doesn't suck now, I prefer it to Google Maps where I live.
Whilst I agree with what you say I'm so grateful for Apple Maps simply on the grounds that I try and use Google products as little as possible. Things like Apple Maps keep me in the Apple ecosystem as they add value to my life. I wouldn't use Apple CarPlay either if I had to use Google Maps (granted, I know Waze and others also exist).
Google Maps on iOS works terribly where I am. Current and previous phone. Going through the Caldecott tunnel would fast forward all the stops. Switched to Apple Maps and I’ve been very happy. Just a single glitch noticed (a light appears before a freeway onramp).
Sorry, i didn't mean to be disingenuous. i meant, ads are not the main source of its income.
And in this context, that's why it is not a foolish choice to spend money on something that it's hard to sell ads on as long as it helps sell more iPhones.
One of the selling points of Apple devices is that their software is [1] just _nice_ to use, letting you do what you need to do, without having to keep you in and monetize you otherwise.
Is Mail.app the most powerful client on earth? No; but it is Good Enough, and I don't have to download and pay for a third party app.
Is Weather.app the best weather app with all the bells and whistles possible? No; but I don't care about weather apps to download and trial fifteen other ones and It Just Works.
Maps are (orders of magnitude) more complicated; but arguably are also on the baseline level of functionality for a modern mobile OS.
And Maps.app is just so much _nicer_ to use than Google Maps. It has the same problems that all Apple products like it does (search is atrocious, POI db is bad); but it is just a much more pleasant product. It looks nicer, it _feels_ nicer, it has best-in-class transit directions, and doesn't shove ads in front of my face.
[1]: Arguably getting worse and worse at it every year; but still miles ahead of everyone else.
Google Maps had a total monopoly and Google could have leveraged that in the competition between Android and iOS. Maybe they even tried asking Apple for a lot of money to be able to use it on iOS.
It takes years, even a decade to get maps to a good quality (Apple maps launched in 2012). So I think it's a good thing that Apple started early enough. I'm sure it's crazy expensive to build and maintain. Apple can fund it from iPhone sales, and ensure that their ecosystem has an alternative for Google maps.
I don't think it's meant to turn a profit, I think it's meant as protection of their iPhone revenue.
It has no public transit support? or did I miss a button? I mean it's one of the only use I have for a desktop map, plan your route ahead, see where to go, and how to go there.
Why are mapping services so stingy with custom lists of pinned location? This announcement from Apple made me excited because Google Map's saved list has become unusable for me. I have 8,000+ favorites (used to mark places I've visited) on Google Maps and behavior above 500 is undefined. On Mobile, Google Maps loads an arbitrary list of 3,000 pins. Unfortunately, Apple is even worst with a limit of 100 [2]
For Google Maps, They have an “official” limit of 500 where anything beyond that is not guaranteed. In practice, the current limit is 3,000.
I’m wondering if Apple Maps is doing something similar where they set a low official limit that they can walk back on / to in the future, as to avoid legal responsibility
Don't know what I was expecting, but Apple Maps seems to be as noisy as Google Maps, maybe event more. So many businesses listed, some with long names taking 5 lines. Good thing this is "not supported" on Firefox, I might've found even more issues.
I would really love to see a "maps" app that focuses specifically on local discovery for businesses and other points of interest. Or, one that at least makes a real attempt to deliniate between getting you to a known place, and finding you new places to go.
Most mapping apps seem to blend navigation & discovery into a single experience that winds up being worse at both.
>DuckDuckGo Taps Apple Maps to Power Private Search Results
>Try it out with one of the many different ways you can search for places on DuckDuckGo:
Search for an address
Search for a geographical place
Search for a local business
Search for a type of business
Search for places nearby
>At DuckDuckGo, we believe getting the privacy you deserve online should be as simple as closing the blinds. Naturally, our strict privacy policy of not collecting or sharing any personal information extends to this integration. We do not send any personally identifiable information such as IP address to Apple or other third parties. For local searches, where your approximate location information is sent by your browser to us, we discard it immediately after use. You are still anonymous when you perform map and address-related searches on DuckDuckGo. You can read more about our anonymous localized results here.
Why is that? Having Google's ability to navigate with live traffic data isn't a valuable feature to you? Apple's traffic-flow is mostly a joke to me, and I've never seen anyone trust it.
Apple gives better verbal instructions, e.g. "go past this light, then at the next, turn right" and it neatly shows which lane to be in. I can get where I am going even without looking at the map. Last time I used Google Maps it would give you no clues until it was basically "MAKE A HARD RIGHT NOW".
my colloquial evidence …
apple maps is the most accurate in predicting time to destination and handles network instability in a way i prefer (keeps you on the track and just notifies you’re in offline mode)
google maps suggests more alternative routes that may save me time but their predictions are generally less accurate. network instability seems to cause the application to “panic” and it just starts spinning around - especially when walking through downtown areas
while google has a sleeker presentation of traffic and shows the “red highlighter of misery and frustration” on my map more precisely, it’s timing is generally wildly incorrect and apple has already routed me around the problem and with more accurate time to destination estimates
Anecdotally: I use Apple Maps when I need directions (mostly because it’s native/integrated and not google), for drives over an hour my experience is that the ETA time is +/- 5min even when there is lots of traffic.
Except in one edge case where my girlfriend and I were doing a 7 hour drive traveling east late at night on an empty highway and our eta increased by an hour then a little while later another hour, we were so confused and thought we might be driving in the wrong direction! Until we figured out we had crossed a time zone and it was also day light savings!
This -- Apple highlights rail lines in their appropriate colors, which is an amazing way to visualize how lines are routed. Google's is kind of half-baked in comparison, IMO.
Satellite (actually aerial) images are very expensive to collect and not all that useful.
Oddly, until recently Brisbane's satellite maps on Google were over a decade old even though it showed a current year copyright. More up to date on Apple Maps, except it doesn't have Brisbane in 3D, even though it does have Gold Coast.
First problem: the searchbox does not get focus upon opening. Looking for a place is the main thing you do. Why does it require mouse handling and handling at all?
No keyboard response to Escape. It's basically the maps widget with a user unfriendly, but nice looking, drawer
Same with the Contacts app on macos, it's slow, crashes, and I doubt anyone uses it
Other example: voice memos. Takes 20 seconds to start recording if you have a long list (30+) of recordings. It needs to find the next available file name. Instead of just listing them, it probably loads every files and tries to read some xml metadata instead.
I’ve been using Google Maps forever. When Apple Maps came out, I experimented with it a bit, even tried using it as a default, and it was terrible. Several locations it couldn’t find, or just was in the completely wrong location. Even businesses were missing.
Every now and then I try it out, and it will seem improved a bit over the previous time, but it won’t take long before I run into an address that is again missing or incorrect.
After a while, I gave up on it altogether. But sometimes on CarPlay, I will accidentally end up on Apple Maps, and will realize it after it either has me going in the wrong direction, or it can’t find the place I’m going.
Even my last trip a couple weeks ago this happened.
I’m surprised it has the usage it does, because still to this day, I — admittedly anecdotally — still have issues with the data.
I think maybe in larger cities it functions better. But outside of large cities, I think the data is still quite a bit behind Google Maps.
Your last line is right, it's definitely a location thing. I've been using Apple Maps for years in the various big cities I've lived and I strongly prefer it over Google Maps, but whenever I'm on vacation I'll switch to Google.
I live about a dozen miles from the Googleplex in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Apple Maps has roads all around me that do not exist: at best jeep trails but mostly logging roads from 150 years ago that are nothing but forest today, barely hiking trails at this point. Apple Maps is a joke outside of major cities and has been since its debut.
There's no way to detect that via signals because if there's no cell reception, people's phones won't report back where they are/aren't driving. So you'd have to report it by hand if you care.
Anyway, if it's showing on a consumer map that probably means it was never removed from official data sources like USGS TIGER.
How does it do with traffic? I was driving with a friend who was using apple maps recently, and I was able to save us from a ~20 minute traffic jam on i5 by just taking an early exit
I opened it up and was a little surprised by what it showed in my surrounding area. It was filled with restaurants and businesses that haven't existed for years. There must be thousands or even tens of thousands of apple maps users that live in the area that see those places in the app every day. I wonder how often they try to visit one of those places. Perhaps they have a habit of searching on google (or google maps I suppose) to verify that it exists before they go to a new place? Very interesting.
I used to be extremely loyal to google maps but they simply haven't added any notable features in more than a decade. They still end the route automatically "at destination", even if you missed your turn and now are driving miles past your destination, which made me frustrated enough one day to dump it and never look back.
Apple maps does something similar but they enter "parking mode" rather than just summarily ending navigation. A little change but a huge difference in usability.
I've heard that google maps has turned into a "magic box". They'll never change the core architecture because the original developers are long gone, and any attempts to replace it are likely to result in an inferior product.
It appears to check viewport width alongside user agent. Shrinking my browser down in responsive mode results in the same "browser unsupported" screen.
I want to use Apple Maps. In a few areas I find they beat google. Airport Maps, Transit.
But Google has deep integrations with a lot of things that just make it nice to use. For example, Apple Maps has bike directions. Google maps has bike directions that integration directly with the local bikeshare. So you can an ETA that includes walking time to/from the bikeshare stations for picking up and dropping off bikes.
Right now Google Maps is at the "It just works" phase and Apple is not there, though they are improving quite a bit.
I live downtown in a busy neighborhood and Google has a "How busy is it right now?" thing, as inaccurate as it potentially is, is super helpful so I don't walk over to a bar/restaurant and find out its packed to the brim with people singing Titanic over karaeoke.
Precisely. For Macs Apple made a Pro Workflows team that looked at a bunch of specific tasks done by photographers, videographers, programmers etc and worked to make macs, ipad and iphones better for those specific things.
They need a team like that for Maps. Run someone through "I want to go to a bar tonight" on Google Maps, have them try it on Apple Maps, spec out what is needed to actually make it work, and repeat for a couple dozen use cases.
They really have been able to do this for a few areas within maps. If they broaden this out they'll be a serious contender for Google Maps. They already have them beat on privacy, speed, ios integration etc
The way I see it--and I mean this in a non-pejorative way--Apple as a company has autism. Google has ADHD.
Apple Maps launched in 2012. That's 12 years that Apple has been plugging away at this. I think we've seen just how much effort is required to catch up to Google Maps. Google actually does a ton to clean up and integrate data from different sources. It adds up.
Apple sticks with things they start for the most part (Ping anyone?). Apple Pay is the poster child for this. Every week there's an announcement where some bank in Estonia has been added. They've slowly built out an ecosystem.
That's what I mean by autism.
Google OTOH has ADHD. If something doesn't immediately work, they lose interest and it gets cancelled. They've reached a point where doing anything requires commitment.
Most of Google's successful products are acquisitions. Android, Maps, Docs, Youtube are obvious examples. Exceptions include search (obviously), Chrome and Gmail.
There are areas where it's almost a joke how many variants of a product have existed and been shuttered over the years. Payments and messaging springs to mind.
Apparently Apple has decided that Maps is core to their business and they've stuck to it. I don't disagree. Good for them. Still, not supporting Firefox? Hopefully that's temporary.
Nice. With the current trajectory Apple Maps will be a serious competitor to Google Maps.
When it first came out we all made fun of it and it deserved that fun to be made. It was absolutely terrible.
Fast-forward to today: I live in Turkey, Google Maps' satellite view is extremely blurry at an unusable level, and Apple Maps displays satellite view perfectly at a nice resolution. There has been a change in street numbers about three years ago here. Apple Maps displays the current new street number while Google Maps still displays the old street number. And before you say Apple is only good at first-world metropolitans: I live in a small town in Turkey, barely more populated than a village in winter.
The only reason I keep Google Maps is compatibility especially when sending location etc to others with Android devices, otherwise I'd have long deleted it.
With this upgrade I might actually indeed delete Google Maps which has one of the worst UX I've seen (well, it's a Google product so that's expected) and very bad data, at least for all my practical purposes.
Where do they source their data? I've contributed a lot of hyperspecific information to OpenStreetMap about my location that Google gets very wrong. It looks like Apple took some of it, slightly tweaked some stuff, and completed ignored other bits.
I like SteetComplete but it's very basic, it just asks basic questions about the area you are in based on existing data.
I will usually set out to document something on my bike and just take lots of pictures, particularly of intersections. I then use the OSM website to update things at home.
The more meta data you feed into OSM, the more pointed questions StreetComplete asks. It can ask about simple things like road composition, street markings, and crossings. Often it's easier and faster to answer questions in App than using the OSM website.
For people who want to contribute but don't feel like traveling around, there's plenty to do at home using aerial or street view data. Many house numbers are wrong or misaligned with home locations.
Many neighborhoods use a hand full of footprints for homes and will mirror them or slap on a different facade. So I like to use aerial photography to trace out the foot prints of a few homes and then copy paste those onto all the like model homes.
Then I use street view photography to get accurate house numbers and update maps as well. The house numbers and locations vary wildly but for condos and townhomes they're usually pretty bad.
Simply putting accurate house numbers on foot prints makes a world of difference. Companies like Lyft and Amazon use OSM data for pickups and deliveries.
Road information is also often out dated, especially for new construction. We had a lot of people in our neighborhood complaining about Lyft pickups not being able to navigate to their location. I fixed our neighborhood, tagged Lyft on Twitter and they updated their maps within a week.
A version, or two, ago they've introduced their own rating system where you can thumb's up/down certain criteria (which elude me, right now. but, of the "ambiance", "food quality", "service", etc. variety). So, I imagine they're looking to ween off of Yelp for their rating's system.
What I miss the most from Apple Maps is their lack of user content (at least in Germany). While I can find many pictures and reviews of every tiny store on Google Maps, Apple usually only has a handful of reviews and almost no photos submitted.
There doesn't seem to be any reverse geocoding available. "Current location" puts me over 200 miles from where I am. You can't click anywhere on the map to get directions, you have to either click a location (already identified as such, with a name and icon) or type in an address. It's unclear that said locations are even clickable because the mouse icon doesn't change to a pointer. Directions are in miles only and I couldn't find an option to switch to metric; and they take a couple of seconds to be generated. No bike option. Many browsers aren't supported. (And of course no street view either).
I would sooner attribute the former to "didn't work at all" than "was smart enough to cross check and be confident enough to figure out the location data was inaccurate and hide the result from the user".
I'm quite happy to see this, since a long time ago I worked with various mapping providers (back when telcos had their own map and driving apps). One of the folk I worked with went to Apple, and I suspect this is their work :)
Wow, after playing with it for a few minutes, I find it to actually be better than the horrible desktop version in Sonoma, where click-and-drag to move the map around inexplicably _drags place labels_ if you accidentally start the drag on one, and where clicking on a category search like "supermarkets - search nearby" always recenters around your current location instead of honoring your current map view.
The color scheme and styling they're using is one of the worst I've ever seen, even zoomed in a lot it's very hard to see roads clearly. And zoomed out enough to see 2 nearby towns all the roads aren't even shown, only a major highway.
Seems strange Apple offering this for free for other platform users.
This also makes me wonder how much does it cost to run a Map services. I assume the actual server and bandwidth cost are negligible. But the updating and Data would be the most expensive part. But what incentive does Apple have to open this up?
Protomaps makes hosting maps pretty cheap for open streetmap vector tiles. Most of the cost is actually the CDN bandwidth. It's not going to be nothing depending on the number of users but it shouldn't break the bank for Apple and probably is relatively low to other content they distribute (e.g. Apple TV) or OS updates.
The way protomaps does this is by serving a single large file with all the map data via bucket storage and then using lambda functions + CDNs to extract tiles from there on demand. So, they don't pre-calculate the tile files and this simplifies the update process to replacing a single file. The CDN caches the extracted tiles so this is relatively cheap and doable even for small startups. So, this minimizes compute and storage.
Generating the map tiles requires a bit of compute obviously but it's a constant overhead; and they have to do this anyway for their native apps.
Probably the hardest part for them was building a hardware accelerated render engine for the web. Similar to Maplibre, Google Maps, etc. That would explain why it doesn't work on Firefox as well. And obviously Safari is a bit lagging with things like web GPU and WASM that I imagine would be useful for this.
I’m on both iOS, macOS and Linux. One thing that’s keeping me using Google Maps is not having Apple Maps in the browser (on Linux). This definitely could lower the switching threshold.
I fear running all these services is expensive too - not just the data & updates.
You need quite a lot of infrastructure:
1. map tiles
2. satellite view
3. geocoding. Where you have several services like forward, reverse, IP2coord. Likely also different services for different countries.
4. A-B routing. Again with several services like car, bike, walking and transit. Especially transit is a completely different thing. Also traffic data requires a different data pipeline.
I was also surprised to see that there is no cost for using Apple Maps (maybe because it's a beta?).
How will this affect services like Google Maps, Mapbox, and similar providers?
Instead of taking the wide open freeway beside us it put us through downtown, to the other side of town, to a different freeway. But it didnt get us on the freeway itself, just residential roads beside it.
Considering how bad Apple Maps is, I’m not sure why they wouldn’t spend resources improving that before making a web version that absolutely no one will use because it will suck as much as the app (if not more)
Good job apple team! Very smooth experience. Fyi you may want to sanitize some of your response headers because one can easily tell Envoy is running at the edge. Upstream service latency looks healthy though :)
But Apple Maps has been on the web for ages? It's been DuckDuckGo's map service for as long as I've accidentally used it instead of just going to google maps manually
For routing you have to click a POI, can't pick just any place on the map. Impossible to route POI to POI without typing out the name of at least on of them.
the only thing I like in Google maps more than Apple Maps is reviews. Yelp integration in Apple is annoying as it asks me to open an app to view photos from a place.
I’ve been a Mac and iOS user since practically day 1, and I’m not a fan of Google’s privacy policies (or rather lack thereof). But frankly, Apple maps just sucks. A map app that doesn’t have trustworthy POIs is useless. My wife’s retail store moved locations about 5 months ago and its still showing the old location on Apple Maps. She was able to update the location on Google on the day they moved, but Apple just refuses to move it. She submitted multiple times to get it moved via Apple’s business owner portal, I submitted with the “report incorrect information” link multiple times over the course of months, and it still shows up wrong. The worst part is, you actually get a response that says they looked at your report and took action, yet they do absolutely nothing.
If you google for this, there’s tons of reports on Reddit and Apple’s discussion forums with the same complaints. Apple apparently doesn’t care.
So weird! I was just looking for this 2 days ago, and was like, "Huh, I thought they had a web app??" Turns out it was always for devices native only. I had no idea this was coming but 2 days ago was the first time I was looking for a web version! Hahaha! :)
edit: Just tested it. Nice! Faster than Google Maps in my estimation. (panning and zooming the map builds and focuses faster). Google, please don't delete my account for criticism! hahaha! :)
Running Safari on MacOS (latest) I see in the console:
[Error] Could not connect to the server.
[Error] Fetch API cannot load https://xp-qa.apple.com/report/2/xp_amp_web_perf_log due to access control checks.
[Error] Failed to load resource: Could not connect to the server. (xp_amp_web_perf_log, line 0)
> … is compatible with Safari and Chrome on Mac and iPad, as well as Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs.
So Apple forces you into walled gardens and leaves you to be spied upon. So much for their pro-privacy stance. Firefox isn't just not supported, it is being actively blocked: “Your current browser isn't supported”!
More evidence that the relationship between a user and a megacorp can only be adversarial (not that this is news).
assuming apple maps was written in Swift or objective-C. you would think with the resources Apple have - it would have ported majority of their apps to the browser.
since the languages they use easily compile to wasm. just like how google earth uses c++ etc.
The worst part of Apple Maps is it doesn't have "always point north" mode. That makes it unuseable for those of us that can't use non-North turn-by-turn maps.
It's been a feature request for many years now and Apple hasn't done anything about it.
I would imagine that people who need Google Maps on the web are more likely to stick to that one platform everywhere. Offering Apple Maps on web makes needing to stick to Google Maps less necessary.
Agreed. But historically, Apple pushed users really hard towards their native apps. I’d be personally happy using a better web version of for example Apple Notes when I’m forced to use Windows.
the thing is that Maps is a much stickier platform for cross-platform solutions than most other kinds of native apps, and so Apple is starting with the disadvantage here.
Technically you can access notes via iCloud.com. Maps has just been totally inaccessible to Windows users until today.
The more time moves on the more Apple's "App First/App Only" approach seems to feel like a mistake.
While yeah there has been a handful of benefits to it on iOS specifically, the move of real work to iPads never materialzed so real work still gets done on Macbooks and therefore searches for locations, calendars, documents, etc all end up in Google infrastructure instead of Apple.
Hilarious that it is 2024 and Apple are only now releasing a browser version of their maps. Reminds me of how god-awfully outdated Safari and iMessage are, but Apple pursues their walled garden policy regardless.
> Why should they optimize for the <0.1% of people who don't have JS enabled?
Because their competitors do that.
Most counts place non-js users (which is not always their choice) between 1% and 4%.
That means that for every 10,000 users, there will be between 100 and 400 that don't have js enabled. It's been estimated that buzzfeed, which we use as a traffic example, gets over 10 million requests that don't support js per month.
You need to be specific. It's very much location based in terms of data quality and how current it is. It's great in the SF Bay Area, which isn't surprising given where Apple is based.
I mean this seems like the same thing that happened to the rest of the market already… the consolidation is just happening within the chrome ecosystem rather than it happening to the alternatives.
Almost as if it was a bad idea to kick away the last check against chrome monoculture. Maybe more mono than people anticipated.
Doesn't work with Firefox?! Are we back to this shit where all the companies want us to use IE6? Come on, this is so janky. Especially for a company like Apple.
Does this in some way imply that the web is a significant part of their strategy?
The button in the bottom left explains why this exists: It's a gateway to get more information about businesses and other attractions from entities out there in the world that don't live in the Apple ecosystem. Apple Maps ultimately needs a direct line to the real world to be maximally useful, especially against its competitors, and this is their attempt to build that bridge.
Ha ha ha Apple still thinks 'the web' is Apple or Microsoft
(https://support.apple.com/en-us/120585) and Firefox is not supported at all.
It's time to shake the last rotten apple from the tree.
I normally find that stuff I build for the web just works in Chrome and Firefox and it’s Safari that requires hacks and workarounds, even when I’m using standard APIs that are widely supported. I’d have to go out of my way to have something work in Chrome but not Firefox.
I'm impressed with how well they've enforced that as well. I tried spoofing my UA to be safari (which I fully expected to not work), but it also didn't accept when I set my UA to Chrome.
What's especially odd is that Apple acknowledges Firefox's existence in their WWDC videos about web features, when they mention browser compatibility or who they're working with.
I thought the same, until I realised I still had `/unsupported` in the URL. Spoofing a Chrome UA and dropping that path from the URL let me load (and use) Apple Maps fine under Firefox.
You cannot fix bugs if you don’t collect them. Neither Mozilla. If you have not enough resources, just collect and track. Fix them when more people are available.
Same for native application ports, ship them as early as possible. Just mark them beta or alpha. At least you collect bugs. Bonus, you filter which are generic issues and which are platform dependent issues.
If it is in such immature condition it should be kept internal.
If it doesn’t work at all in a web-browser which handles HTML5 and modern CS it is probably not a website - but a proprietary protocol which needs a special client-application.
> browser compatibility could be something for the launch
This is indeed how many bad/junior engineers approach this issue but it's backward - anyone with any experience doing launch QA knows well that browser compat needs to be built in from Day 1 - retrofitting it is disastrously expensive from a launch-delays perspective.
Like others have pointed out, it seems to work fine in other browsers once you trick it into letting you in. General compatibility doesn't seem to be an issue. So, what is it that Firefox and Chrome on Linux (and only on Linux) don't support?
H.265 is what they don't support. I'm not an avid enough user to know where Apple Maps makes use of media, but the source code contains media player controls, so it must somewhere. Retrofitting compatibility by launch may be as simple as re-encoding the H.265 content. Not at all worth the effort for beta 1, but with an obvious path forward.
> So, what is it that Firefox and Chrome on Linux (and only on Linux) don't support?
H.265 is what they don't support.
Do codecs need to be supported by the browser itself? I thought this was unloaded to some media decoding framework. Linux does have h.265 support at least in mpv.
> Do codecs need to be supported by the browser itself?
Not necessarily. The browser could defer to licensing established by the operating system vendor, but Firefox places the expectation upon itself to have parity across platforms and to not support encumbered technologies.
> Linux does have h.265 support at least in mpv.
And if you've negotiated the licensing fees you can even use it, but chances are... Microsoft and Apple have dealt with the licensing for you on their platforms, so the ballgame is different there.
> To start, Maps on the web is available only in English. Maps on the web will be available for additional browsers, platforms, and languages soon.
Published Date: July 24, 2024
Everything works if you use User-Agent switcher extension. So they went through the trouble of making an "unsupported" page and redirecting you to that page instead of doing nothing
Of course I can. Add cleaning water, check oil levels, replace a light bulb. No much else I can do, but others may, and other won't even do any of this.
Point is, this is not a binary choice. Between user and developer there are many people with varying skills that will use a user-agent switcher if needed.
In my experience (systems engineer/devops for both Windows and Linux for more than 25 years), very few users are actually savvy. Even those working in tech.
there is a good reason that most of the people prefer apple for its simplicity, its because apple only shows you what is required. i agree with you there.
Extremely frustrating. If a user is smart enough to use Firefox, they're probably also smart enough to open another browser if a site does not happen to work on Firefox. (Which I haven't experienced for a while, except when using ESPHome which requires WebSerial)
...which only underscores how pointless this is: if it works in Chrome on MacOS and Windows (https://support.apple.com/en-us/120585), it will also work on Linux, so why exclude Linux?!
Seems like a baseless restriction. I can't find anything wrong with Firefox support itself as I changed my user agent under Firefox and Apple Maps works fine.
It sucks when companies restrict normal access to a website when it's uncalled for. It's not the first time I've gotten "Use Google Chrome" for no reason.
Apple says that MapKit.JS works on Firefox, so this beta web page is probably just working out bugs before they release for FF. Perhaps a rendering issue?
And even in their supported browsers (Chrome at least) I got the "unsupported browser" on Fedora Linux.. Wonder what makes a online map need such a specific (even if its widely used) setup.
Interestingly it works on Opera although the colours are weird (lots of dark greens and blues). On both versions (Edge and Opera), my local bakery is mis-located (by hundreds of yards) compared with its (correctly) reported location on an iPhone.
It's not financially worth supporting, Firefox has 6.53% of desktop and 0.53% of mobile marketshare (Statcounter), with a switching cost of zero if users encounter a breaking issue.
Not surprising it got to this point, Mozilla has been stagnant on features most users care about and catered exclusively to the privacy crowd for years - which isn't a large group and competes with Chromium offshoots (giving it a smaller niche, privacy but demanding an alternative rendering engine).
Sure, but the QA cost to support Firefox is significantly higher than the small fraction of people that will refuse to use a site that doesn't support it when they encounter an issue.
> catered exclusively to the privacy crowd for years
Not even that. Firefox on iOS doesn’t have an integrated adblocker. It’s been requested for years at this point, and browsers like Brave do have one. Pure unwillingness. It’s why I got all my non-techie family and friends to switch to Brave.
* Epiphany with WebKit2-Renderengine. The literally block their own engine.
* Firefox with Gecko.
What year is it? 2001?
No web developer should be allowed to “block” webbrowser. Test for features and say “this thing doesn’t work because of and I don’t care about another solution”. Same shitty experience with Microsoft Teams which blocked - at least some months ago - the call buttons for Firefox, despite everything works fine. And Confluence which claims they don’t block but started, Epipany is now hiding as Safari and…surprise…everything works.
No platform other than Apple-Microsoft proprietary ones?
No browser other than Chrome/Edge plus Safari?
Apple should really be more sympathetic to open standards Web. They might be one regulatory decision away from Google Chrome taking over as the popular browser on Apple products as well. One defense is to hold Google-Microsoft and sites to Web open standards, not bless the proprietary Web.
It appears to work perfectly fine on Firefox. They are only applying the user agent check on the root path, so if you hit https://beta.maps.apple.com/anything it will work on Firefox.
I believe I've tried all the (pretty limited) functionality and I haven't found any justification for blocking Firefox.
That’s weird because you’ve been able to use their embedded web maps for a few years now just fine with Firefox. Wonder what gotcha they ran into implementing the full thing that needed a browser check?
Edit: their browser check is just bad. I get it in safari too.
> That’s weird because you’ve been able to use their embedded web maps for a few years now just fine with Firefox. Wonder what gotcha they ran into implementing the full thing that needed a browser check?
Likely nothing. "Unsupported" messages like that are usually not written based on what the website/webapp can run on, but rather what they have/not have testing for. So if they're only testing it on Windows/macOS/Chrome/Safari, even if their developers probably confirmed it works in Firefox/Linux, they'll add that message/block as their QA doesn't include Firefox or Linux.
I just tried it in Chrome on Linux and it didn't work. Even tried switching my user agent so it would look like i was on Windows but that didn't work either.
Unfortunately, many users will gather from this experience the following sentiment: "if I want to access the latest cutting edge betas, then I should be using something other than Firefox". The net result of this is less browser diversity.
Presumably if it's a beta then you'd want as much feedback from users as possible. How is blocking Firefox in a beta going to help get this in a production ready state?
So weird to see a demand for adherence to open standards justified by... the desire to see Apple preserve the dominance of its decidedly-closed device ecosystem.
Agreed it's weird. But it's not the justification in general.
Apple is so accustomed to leveraging proprietary stranglehold, including sometimes being an outright totalitarian, that they need to realize the precariousness of their position of strength, and learn why most other parties have to at least pretend to believe in non-proprietary interoperation.
A school bully shouldn't wait until they get a debilitating sports injury, and they are suddenly the one getting stuffed into the trash cans, to start preaching&practicing the good word that no one should be stuffed into trash cans.
Life is weird. And in this weird case, Apple’s monopolistic insistence on denying other rendering engines on its phone has prevented the web from devolving into a monoculture.
Under the Helpful? option on that page, I chose No and submitted a comment expressing my disappointment that there was no support for Firefox or any other browser for GNU/Linux users. While I can access Apple Maps on my iPhone, I prefer to be able to view maps on my large desktop monitor.
Maybe they will by the time they come out of beta? It only just launched.
The page you reference even acknowledges this:
>Availability varies depending on region. To start, Maps on the web is available only in English. Maps on the web will be available for additional browsers, platforms, and languages soon.
> Not only Firefox is not supported, but even Chrome on Linux doesn't work.
Which strongly suggests that it makes use of H.265 content somewhere (the source code corroborates such functionality), likely as a carry over from content created for the iOS/macOS versions of Apple Maps where support is granted.
> It's embarrassing for a company such as Apple.
To be fair, it is still in beta. There is still plenty of time for them to recreate the content in a format with wider support before release.
Much more embarrassing is that we enable this state of affairs. The situation that keeps Firefox and Linux from jumping all over H.265 is not some natural property of the universe, it's just a social construct that we uphold by willing choice.
> The situation that keeps Firefox and Linux from jumping all over H.265 is not some natural property of the universe, it's just a social construct that we uphold by willing choice.
Can you elaborate and/or link me to anything related to this?
Patents. To distribute the codec itself or content, you might have to pay patent fees.
For codecs, they are not flat fee[1], but per piece shipped. Which obviously, presents a problem for linux distributions. Even if they had money, they cannot count how many instances there are.
[1] Well, there is a ceiling, if you ship a insanely huge number of them. Linux isn't it. Cisco is, which is why we have openh264 binaries by them.
Basically, H.265 is based on some patents and you would have to license them to be allowed to implement the Codec. Mozilla categorically doesn’t want to do that until they can implement it without any patents.
I understand they "cannot test every possible browser" and that "users may get subpar experience".
I don't understand why there isn't "continue at your own risk" button. Maybe with a scary warning. It's kind of stupid that I have to spoof UA for a website to let me in. And in most cases, everything just works fine.
Maybe one day I'll create a website to inform about the issue.
Firefox, while still significant, represents a smaller portion of users. But I think that the absence of initial support for Firefox doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be supported in the future. Yet I hope so.
"Not supported" on its own does not mean "actively blocked/disabled", which is what this is.
"Supported" means that they provide a certain effort for make the configuration operational for their users, by designing said support if needed and providing assistance as required.
Yeah they are just being lazy and not testing it... so rather than verify it works and fix bugs, they just check your browser agent and redirect you if you aren't using Chrome or Safari. So ghetto! Reeks of the late-90s/early-2000s "Use IE6" messages that companies used to put out when they built a site using Microsoft web components or proprietary APIs.
"Hey look, I can save my PowerPoint as a web page! And it even has the animations!" Except it's 2024, and we have standards, and for them to say, "Oh we don't adhere to the standards" is shockingly bad.
Apple has nothing to replace it with. It's hard to imagine Apple adding reviews and trying to police that — policing their own App Store reviews seems to give the trouble (but perhaps is not a solvable problem).
They could surely negotiate something to get access to Google's reviews. A nice thing about Apple's position is that they have enough money to build or buy whatever they want, depending on how strategic it is. If they buy google's reviews then they get to have access to the best data, and also inject themselves as a middle-man which can allow them to collect their own useful data and know exactly what people are looking at, but also able to claim privacy benefits because they shield people from Google (i.e. stop Google and their evil privacy invading tracking). If content in reviews is objectionable, they can just say "our partner didn't filter as they should, it wasn't us." I think it's actually a pretty good position to be in.
I would argue over a certain threshold of human comments/reviews/inputs this is invariably an unsolvable problem
People rightfully give FAANG crap for improper policing (as they should) but in their defence I have yet to see a single solution successfully implemented platform wide, ever
They've added ratings to the Maps app for certain categories of businesses (or maybe it's for businesses not in Yelp, dunno). It looks like they are testing it out. It also supports picture upload.
A one star place on Yelp is a warning, especially if there are implied health code violations. But anything else between two and five, I look at the pictures of the food and decide for myself. There's gaming going on for years but pictures can tell a lot, even if it's not everything.
The anti Yelp restaurants that delist themselves from various sites for whatever reason do not exist to me and will never get my business because I will never even think about them when I am thinking about where to eat.
Is there anything better to replace it with? Even if they could use Google's reviews, I don't feel they are much better. I guess they could do a deal with TripAdvisor, which is the only other site I can think of that has fairly comprehensive coverage of reviews, but is TripAdvisor really a step up from Yelp?
Interestingly it is user-agent blocked on Firefox, as noted in sibling comments. But Kagi (the search engine) has been using Apple Maps on their site (kagi.com/maps) for a good while now.
Indeed, I was surprised this was news because I'd been "using" Apple Maps on the web for quite some time through Kagi and DDG. I say "using" because as soon as I realize it is Apple maps I !gm to get to Google Maps instead, but I've gotten deep enough to know that it (at least seemed to) work.
Just a theory. But I think they are preparing for the notion that there's a growing number of PWAs in their app stores. And most of those would be using things like maplibre or Google Maps. So, to address that (given that they can't really stop PWAs), it makes sense to make Apple Maps usable outside of the Apple platforms. This way, people can develop PWA apps and have some level of integration with Apple maps on IOS. Just a theory.
The browser restrictions are probably because developing hardware accelerated map rendering engines for the web is a bit of a project and the support for things like WASM and Web GPU in Safari is probably requiring dealing with some Apple specific quirks. Maybe they'll get around to that eventually. I think for most web developers, no Firefox support would be a show stopper. There's no point to this strategy unless they address that.
They already had MapKit.js as a mapping SDK available across various browsers, off their own hardware. It's been available on a variety of browsers, even Firefox, this is just a beta that doesn't support it.
Do you regularly use one of them? I've been aware of them for years but I've been never motivated to activity use them due to overall poor UX. Sign-in is already a hassle there.
Yet I appreciate them maintaining them because I once had recovered my access to my devices when I was almost locked out of Apple ID (don't quite remember the detail though).
As others have said, they already have a few (Mail, Music, iWork, FaceTime, etc). Like FaceTime coming to browser, and apple music going to android, this is probably an attempt to cast a wider net for their ecosystem. Also the EU DMA law is could be causing some strange behavior here.
I wouldn't be surprised to see apple try and release some expanded subscription that includes mapping features. Not sure what TBH and there have been no leaks, but they're searching for revenue streams, and the App Store is getting eyed by regulators.
Oh and the browser restriction is probably temporary - MapKit.js works on all major platforms, even Firefox, so its safe to assume this will get there too.
I use it too...but it's a really poor app. Search is incredibly slow and clunky, discovery is nonexistant, they've still got the same shuffle logic bugs they had in iTunes, etc.
The most annoying part is they CDN from California for UK/EU users. Start playing something not downloaded, hit skip a couple of times and enjoy 10 seconds of buffering.
The Apple Music web app is so terrible it made me doubt the engineering ability of the whole company. Can't sort collections, can't edit playlists, songs randomly getting skipped, etc. etc. It was like they actively hated the users and wanted to punish them for using the web app.
I just wish that Apple Music Classical would get a web app. That's the only reason why I'm paying $12 per month. Although I suppose most of the classical pieces are available on regular Apple Music as well...
When I see the low level of support that Apple provides for various less popular web browsers, it reminds me of a certain story:
A friend of mine once worked a long time ago at an IT company that was building an online store. He wrote a script there that displayed a message whenever someone accessed the site using Netscape "Get lost, jerk, with that Netscape and go straighten bananas on a tree”.
The company was quite popular in my country, and that message caused a lot of outrage on Usenet groups.
Firefox is being marginalised mostly by Mozilla corporation others seem to just don't care much about dying browser, it is weird that it is broken on Safari with iOS for some folks as it is Apple product.
Pretty much. Even as a disillusioned mac user I wouldn't rely on their maps app but no compatibility with my browser of choice means that I'll never bother using their product under any circumstances.
I have to say, this is pretty bad even for a beta.
* the map is downright unreadable on a 34 inch ultrawide screen on Chrome/macOS, in dark mode - it's very dark grey on black, with small text in a weird font
* the UI is obviously mobile-style, badly inspired by Google Maps, with a tiny bar to the left; even when clicking on submenus (guides -> one of the guides), it stays miniscule even though there's a massive real estate to work on
* there's only by car and by foot, which means it's useless for a lot of the world that uses public transit or biking
* for some reason it defaults to the wrong measurement system even though my locale and location should be enough to deduce I don't care about miles
