So today's the day everybody's been circling on the calendar: iPhone 5 hits stores, and I guarantee there's a line wrapped around the Apple Store at the mall right now, probably has been since like 5am. I am not in it. I've got a 4S that's barely a year old and honestly still works fine, so I'll let somebody else stand in the cold for the taller screen. That's not really what I want to write about anyway, because something more annoying happened to me two days ago and I'm still a little salty about it.
iOS 6 came out Wednesday. I updated my phone that night without thinking much of it, the way you update anything, and it wasn't until the next morning that I actually noticed the big change: Google Maps is gone. Not hidden, not moved to a folder — gone, replaced by Apple's own homegrown Maps app, and I did not know how much I'd come to depend on the old one until it wasn't there anymore.
Here's the thing nobody warns you about. I needed directions to a dentist's office off Route 9 that I'd only been to once before, typed the address in like I've done a thousand times, and the app very confidently dropped a pin in the middle of a field near a town I've never even driven through. Not close. Not "huh, that building's actually next door" close. A cornfield, two towns over. I ended up just calling the place and asking for directions like it's 2004 again.
And it's not only me being unlucky with one address. People are already collecting screenshots of the worst stuff Apple Maps is doing — landmarks in the 3D flyover view looking melted, like someone left them out in the sun too long, bridges that dip into the water, whole neighborhoods rendered as blurry green nothing. Somebody's put together a tumblr just cataloging the ugliest ones, and I spent about twenty minutes scrolling it last night instead of doing literally anything productive. There's also no public transit directions built in anymore, which is a genuinely strange thing to cut, since that was one of the things I actually used the old app for constantly. Now it just tells you to go find a transit app in the App Store, which, thanks, very helpful, love being redirected to go solve my own problem.
I get why Apple did this. The license situation with Google was apparently never going to last forever, and they clearly want their own thing under the hood long term, turn-by-turn navigation and all that, which the old app never really did well anyway. Fine. I'm not against the idea in principle. But shipping it this rough, this fast, to every single iPhone in one update, feels like the kind of decision that gets made in a boardroom and not by anyone who's actually tried to find a dentist's office in an unfamiliar town. It's the kind of thing where you can tell the engineers were rushed, and I don't love being the one who finds that out in real time on the side of Route 9.
Small silver lining, the app is fast and the turn-by-turn voice guidance for routes it actually gets right is genuinely nicer than what I had before, smoother animations, less lag redrawing the screen when you're driving. So it's not a total wash. It's just early, and it shows.
Meanwhile they're also saying iPhone 5 preorders blew past two million units in the first 24 hours last week, which is an absurd number when you sit with it for a second, and today's launch is going to be its own circus of people posting unboxing photos before lunch. Somewhere in all that a good chunk of new iPhone 5 owners are going to open Maps for the first time this weekend and get their own version of my cornfield moment. I almost feel bad for them. Almost.
Anyway. If you're one of the people in line right now, enjoy the new phone, and maybe just keep the paper directions handy for a couple weeks until this thing gets sorted out. I'm going to go see if there's a way to get the old Google Maps back as a bookmark in Safari, because apparently that's where we're at now.