> With the cash they have at hand I'm surprised they simply didn't buy out an existing maps provider.
That's more or less what they did, the maps are coming from TomTom and Waze. The main issue with the iOS 6 maps application appears not to be with the map data itself, but with the (lack of) points-of-interest and their accuracy, which cripples the search functions. A company like TomTom is mainly concerned with maps and points-of-interest for car navigation, much less with finding individual shops, landmarks or other places you find by other means than street address. Probably you won't have any problems finding gas stations, motels or roadside restaurants and such with iOS 6 maps, but good luck finding all widget shops in New York. TomTom's navigation units do have some points-of-interest outside of what you'd expect from a satnav, but it's a far, far cry from the amount of data Google has.
As it stands, I don't think there is any single party besides Google that has so much diverse geographically indexed data. There simply is no company that Apple could have bought to fill that gap. It will probably take them years to gather even half of the data Google Maps already provides.
The article identifies Dudley and Stratford-upon-avon as broken in Apple's app. Both Dudley and Stratford-upon-avon are identified fine in the TomTom (nee Tele Atlas) online route planner if you search by name [1]
If you compare the first example image from the article [2] with the TomTom data [3] you can see the minor roads are present in TomTom's data, present in Google's data, but absent in the screenshot of Apple's software.
This may well indicate a problem with Apple's software.
I looked up Sunderland Street, Tickhill, England on the new Maps app, and all the streets shown in the old Maps screenshot in the second image are there. Perhaps they've already added the missing data? The Satellite imagery in that area remains particularly bad, though. I think if Apple can iterate and improve the app quickly, the initial errors won't be that significant.
My best guess is there's a problem in serving the map data up to users.
Vector slippy maps run on bounding box searches - if I look at New York, my client says to the server "Tell me all the roads within this square" with the latitude and longitude of wherever I'm looking.
There's a lot of data - too much to store on one server - and the data doesn't all shard naturally. You can divide the world up into squares and store different squares on different servers, but long roads cross many squares, big objects like country borders belong in many squares, and when you're zoomed out your view covers many squares.
The server also has to be clever; I don't actually want every road in New York or the data would take forever to load. I only want the major roads when I'm zoomed out.
All these problems are solvable - spatial databases like PostGIS have been able to perform bounding box queries for years - but I don't know of anyone using PostGIS to support the millions of users Google have. It's well known that for regular data Google has things like BigTable, fancy NoSQL stuff that's supposed to scale well; I assume they have a geospatial database along similar lines. It's possible Apple decided to develop something similar.
My guess as to how [1] came about is that the user started zoomed out, so they only got sent major roads, then when they zoomed in some hiccup prevented loading the minor roads. This could have been as simple as the user's wifi going down, or it could that Apple's database servers are overloaded or have bugs.
I have been using 6 since the first beta versions and one thing I have noticed is sometimes they show up, sometimes they are misplaced and sometimes they are not even there. My rough guess that this may have something to do with the accuracy of your location seed, and the algorithm they use to place stuff around where they think you are. I would imagine they factor it in for error correction and maybe when they get a less accurate seed, it throws everything off. It's a wild guess but based on my limited observation it seems like something like that is happening, some times it nails it and sometimes you get a WTF. I usually just do another search and it clears it up, but that only works if you know what you are looking for, which is my general use case for maps.
Still, even as a Gooner, to not be able to find Old Trafford with a search for Manchester United Football Club is beyond fail. It's the most popular ground and most successful club in the country.
> That's more or less what they did, the maps are coming from TomTom and Waze.
No wonder it's so terrible. I have Waze but I see it as nothing more than a navigation toy. It has turn by turn but otherwise it's pretty terrible compared to google maps.
That may sound flip, but I'm very serious. Their app commits the cardinal sin of going out of its way to distract people who are driving a ton of metal and plastic at high speeds (what the hell is a mapping application doing with "pick-ups" on the road and why the hell is it beeping at me for it?!). It's the most irresponsible app I've seen on a phone. I don't call many companies "evil" but Waze seems maliciously so.
They've bought at least 2 map-related companies so far (Poly9 and C3) and are using existing datasets (e.g. tomtom's), but Apple doesn't actually move really fast: just look at PA Semi, we're only finally seeing their work with the A6 (allegedly, to be confirmed). Apple bought P.A. 4 years ago...
I'm not sure that's a great comparison: four years would seem about right, given PA Semi's main expertise at the time of acquisition was Power rather than ARM. Designing a custom ARM core isn't rocket science, but it's pretty close: plus you've then got to actually get the things fabricated at sufficient yield.
I am not sure they could have done things much quicker to be honest.
