I installed iOS 6 beta the morning WWDC finished streaming, which in retrospect was not my wisest life choice. My phone became a very expensive paperweight that knew how to turn left at the Chrysler Building except it had no idea where the Chrysler Building actually was.
Apple replacing Google Maps felt kind of inevitable once you thought about it. Google's been cagey about their terms, the relationship's always been weird and tense, and Apple wants to own the whole experience. Control freaks gonna control. But knowing it made sense intellectually didn't stop the beta from being a dumpster fire.
Two weeks in, I've taken it everywhere. To my office, which it insists is three blocks away from where I actually am. To that Thai place on 5th that it thinks is a parking garage. The turn-by-turn navigation's got this robotic British lady who sounds like she's never actually been in a car before. Very confident about directions that are wildly wrong. I called an Uber somewhere last week and showed the driver what my phone said the address was, he took one look and said, "not even close," and just knew where to go from my actual words.
The thing that gets me though is that Maps isn't uninspired. It's just rushed. You can tell Apple threw massive resources at this and still came up short. The vector-based rendering's actually pretty nice when it works. They built 3D views for a bunch of cities that are genuinely cool to mess around with. The Flyover stuff is honestly ridiculous in the best way, you can tilt and spin and actually see buildings from above. It feels like showing off, which is very Apple.
What's maddening is knowing they're not done. This is beta 1. This is Apple's team saying publicly "we built something and we know it's broken but we're shipping it in September anyway," which is such a wild thing for them to usually do. They don't usually let the world see software this unfinished. They definitely don't usually ship something to hundreds of millions of people while basically shrugging.
But it also means something's changing. There was a time when Apple released iOS and it felt like a finished product handed to you by people who'd tested every millimeter. iOS 6 feels more like a real company doing real work and sometimes the work doesn't land right. Google Maps took forever to get good, and no one thinks twice about it anymore. Maybe Maps will be the same thing in a year.
Still driving me absolutely up the wall right now though. I reloaded Google Maps from 2010 onto my spare iPhone just to remember what proper routing looks like. It's not even that fancy but it works, you know? It gets me where I'm going. Apple's trying to innovate and it's stumbling all over itself trying to do too much. The transit directions don't exist yet. The search is terrible. Half the businesses don't show up.
For now I'm tethering navigation to my iPad when I really need to go somewhere. For around my neighborhood where I actually know my way, it doesn't matter that Maps is nonsense. The Siri integration's getting better too, voice commands aren't completely useless like they were in beta 1.
I'll keep it on the phone. Partly because I'm a masochist, partly because watching Apple actually struggle with something is kind of interesting. They'll fix it. They have to. But it's weird to see them not get it right on day one.