Look, I've been sitting with this for about ten days now since WWDC, and I still don't know how I feel about Apple ripping out Google Maps from iOS 6.
Actually, that's a lie. I know exactly how I feel: it's a terrible idea that I'm going to defend anyway.
Here's what happened. At WWDC last week, Craig Federighi got up on stage and basically said Apple is throwing Google Maps overboard and building their own. Custom vector maps, turn-by-turn navigation, Flyover (which is admittedly gorgeous when it works), Siri integration: the whole package. They're ripping out a service that millions of people use every single day and replacing it with something that, let's be honest, doesn't exist yet. Not really. Not at the quality Google Maps has spent a decade building.
The internet response has been pretty much what you'd expect: fury. People are terrified. And they should be! Google Maps is good. Like, embarrassingly good. I use it on my iPhone constantly. The idea that Apple is going to just delete it is genuinely alarming.
But here's the thing that's been nagging at me: Google Maps is so good because Apple couldn't be bothered to compete. Apple licensed Google's work, put it in iOS, and called it a day. Meanwhile Google got all this data, all this usage, all this feedback. They got to own the mapping layer of the most important mobile OS in the world. For free.
That can't go on forever. It's a ridiculous situation from Apple's perspective, actually. They built an incredible phone and then had to say "but the maps are made by our competitor." That's nuts.
So yeah, Apple's new maps are probably going to suck at first. The data is incomplete. The satellite imagery will be wonky. Turn-by-turn routing might miss obvious routes. This is going to be a disaster for at least a few hundred thousand users who need reliable navigation.
But someone had to do this.
Tech doesn't move forward when one company gets comfortable. Google got comfortable with Maps because they knew Apple had already surrendered. There was no pressure to innovate faster. Siri gets to call up Google's maps, pull down the data, and nobody questions it. That's great for users in 2010. That's not great for users in 2015.
What Apple's doing is crazy and risky and genuinely might backfire spectacularly. I wouldn't be shocked if iOS 6's Maps becomes a running joke by August. But the alternative—just letting Google own this entire layer of the platform forever—is worse. It's a situation where the best outcome is actually the one where Apple's maps get half-decent in a couple of years and Google actually has to fight to improve.
That's worth a few months of mediocre navigation data.
The part that really gets me, though? I'm sitting here typing this on a MacBook Air that I upgraded to Mountain Lion beta, and I haven't even touched the new Maps app on my actual phone yet. That's not Apple's fault. It's just that I'm paranoid about updating my daily phone mid-beta cycle. I've done it before. It gets ugly. So I'm sitting here defending Apple's Maps vision while still running iOS 5.1.1 and actively avoiding the new maps. The irony is not lost on me.
One more thing: Flyover is genuinely incredible when it actually works. The 3D models of cities are beautiful. I loaded up San Francisco and just... flew around for five minutes like a teenager with a new toy. That part, at least, Apple nailed immediately. It's not useful for anything except pure visual fun, but that matters too. That's the kind of thing that justifies ripping out your old maps entirely: betting that there's enough cool new stuff in there to make people forgive the gaps in the old stuff.