So I didn't stand in line for an iPhone 5 this weekend. My upgrade isn't until January and I am cheap, so I did the thing plenty of you probably did instead: plugged my 4S into iTunes Wednesday night and let iOS 6 install while I made dinner. Twenty minutes later I had a phone that looked basically the same, except Google Maps was just gone. Not hidden, not demoted to page two of an app folder. Gone. In its place: Apple's brand new, homegrown Maps app, built on TomTom data and, apparently, vibes.
I want to be fair here because I know how this goes: everybody and their cousin has already written the "iPhone 5 launch day" post this week, lines around the block, five million units sold, all of that. I don't have anything to add to that pile and I'm not going to pretend I do. What I actually want to talk about is Saturday afternoon, standing outside a burrito place in my own neighborhood, watching my phone insist it did not exist.
Here's what happened. I typed in the address of a taqueria I have been to probably forty times. Apple Maps found it fine, actually, gave me a pin, gave me turn by turn. Great. Except it dropped me two blocks north, at what turned out to be a parking lot behind a laundromat, with the little blue dot blinking away like it was very confident about this. I know the neighborhood, so I just walked the extra two blocks and laughed about it. But my friend Dana, who was using it to find a new dentist's office out in the suburbs same day, was not laughing: she ended up in someone's driveway.
And it's not just addresses being a little off, which, fine, whatever, Google's not always perfect either. It's the weird stuff layered on top. Search for a town near where I grew up and the label was floating out in the middle of a field, nowhere near the actual town. Zoom into any kind of bridge or overpass in 3D mode and the render looks like it's been left in the sun too long. I saw a screenshot going around today of some bridge in the UK that looks like it's melting into the water. My own downtown, when I flipped to the 3D flyover thing, had a building that looked like it had been squashed by a cartoon anvil. It's genuinely a little funny, in a way that makes me think somebody at Apple is having a very bad week.
The transit directions thing bugs me more than the visual glitches honestly, because that's not a cosmetic problem, that's a "how do I get to work" problem. There's no built in transit layer at all — you tap it and it just punts you out to whatever transit apps you have installed, which for most people is nothing, so it's kind of a shrug. I've been getting around this city by bus for six years and I'm suddenly back to memorizing schedules like it's 2009.
None of this is a hardware complaint, to be clear. My 4S runs iOS 6 fine, the new Facebook integration in Photos is actually kind of nice, and Passbook is one of those things I didn't know I wanted until I put my one plane ticket in it and felt very futuristic for about four seconds. This is specifically a "the map data behind your map app matters enormously and you cannot just swap it out overnight and expect it to be as good" complaint. Apple built the pretty parts first, the flyover views, the Siri integration, the flat design, and the actual underlying data, the boring unglamorous part where you make sure the pin lands on the right building, feels like it got maybe eighty percent of the way there.
I ended up putting the old Google Maps website as a bookmark on my home screen tonight, which feels a little silly, like going back to using a paper map because the GPS unit is acting up. I'll probably keep flipping back and forth for a while. If you're on the fence about updating and you actually rely on Maps to find things you've never been to before, maybe hold off a week or two and see if this gets better, because right now it very much has that "shipped before it was ready" feeling to it, even if everything else about the update is solid.