Yesterday at WWDC, Tim Cook took the stage and made a decision that's going to annoy a lot of people. Apple is throwing Google Maps out of iOS. All of it. They're replacing it with their own in-house mapping solution that they've apparently been building while nobody was paying attention.
I've been staring at the keynote clips trying to figure out how to feel about this. On one hand, I get the strategic play. Apple wants less dependence on Google. Google Maps is insanely good, they've spent years and billions of dollars making it that way, and Apple doesn't want to keep sending them traffic and usage data forever. Fair enough.
On the other hand... have they actually tested this thing extensively? Because yesterday's demo didn't fill me with confidence. The turn-by-turn directions looked functional but pretty basic. The satellite view was there. The 3D renderings of city skylines looked kind of impressive, I guess, in that uncanny valley way that 3D mapping often does. But it's not Google Maps. Not even close.
What really bothers me is the timing of this decision. Not the announcement timing. That's fine for a keynote. I mean the product decision itself. Google Maps took years to become what it is now. They've got massive teams, they've got Street View data from basically every corner of the planet, they've got ridiculous server infrastructure backing all of it. Apple just decided "we'll do this ourselves" and apparently they think nine months before launch is enough time? (iOS 6 ships this fall, presumably.)
I tested Google Maps on my iPhone 4S yesterday—you know, the thing that's currently rocking an Apple Maps—and the difference is night and day. Google's got way more detail. The data is just better. And I'm not even talking about the weird 3D building renderings. I'm talking about basic stuff like transit directions, which Apple's new Maps... doesn't have. You can't get public transit directions. That's a feature Google's had for years.
There's also this weird thing where Apple is ditching YouTube embeds in their browser and taking Google stuff out of their OS in general. I know Steve Jobs and Google had that whole philosophical falling out over Android. But this feels different. This feels like Apple woke up one morning and decided to cut off every single supply line from Google simultaneously, and they're okay launching half-finished replacements because the optics of depending on a competitor are that bad to them.
Look, maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe by launch in September the Maps app will be incredible. Maybe they've got 500 people working on this in Cupertino that we haven't heard about. But based on what I saw yesterday, it feels premature. And the thing about maps is that it's hard. It's not one of those categories where first-mover advantage or a cleverer UI can just make your product better overnight. You need the data. You need it to be accurate. You need coverage.
The developer story is also unclear. Are third-party apps able to hook into Apple's maps the way they do with Google's? They didn't really say. That matters a lot for apps that use location services.
I don't know. This is one of those moments where Apple's "we'll build everything ourselves" philosophy either pays off massively or becomes a cautionary tale. It's the kind of bet that looks either brilliant or delusional depending on how well they execute over the next six months. And given what I saw in the demo, I'm... skeptical.
I've been using Google Maps on my phone since it came out on mobile. It's sort of the thing I've always pointed to when people ask "what would you actually miss if you switched to Android." So the prospect of losing that on my next iOS device is actually kind of depressing. Which probably means it's working: Apple wants me annoyed at Google's relationship with the platform. But they better have something really, really good to replace it with, because right now, they don't.
We'll know more when the iOS 6 beta gets into developers' hands. But I'm watching this one closely.