So Tim Cook posted that letter today. If you haven't seen it yet, go read it, it's right there on apple.com — an honest-to-god public apology for how bad Maps is in iOS 6, complete with a promise that "we are doing everything we can" to fix it. Which, fine, good, apologies are nice. But the part that actually got my attention was near the bottom, where he tells everyone that until Apple gets its act together, they should go try Bing, MapQuest, Waze, or Nokia Maps instead. Or just open Safari and go to maps.google.com like its 2009 again.
I've had the iPhone 5 for exactly a week now (stood in line at the Roseville store, got there at 6:40am, still ended up like fortieth in line, dont even ask) and Ive been low-key furious about Maps since about day two. My street got renamed to something that doesnt exist. A gas station I use constantly showed up two towns over. And the 3D flyover thing, which is genuinely gorgeous when it works, turned the Hoover Dam into what looked like a Salvador Dali painting. So today, instead of doing literally any of the work I was supposed to do, I spent about three hours actually testing the stuff Cook recommended in that letter.
MapQuest: I havent opened this app since maybe 2006, and downloading it again felt like a weird betrayal of my own personal history. But it works. Its ugly, the icons look like they were designed for a flip phone, and it wanted permission for approximately nine different things before it would even load a route. Turn by turn voice guidance is there though, and it got me from my apartment to the hardware store on Fair Oaks without inventing any new geography. Not glamorous. Functional.
Waze: this one I actually like, and not just as a stopgap. Its a little chaotic with all the little car icons and the police-report pins other users leave, but the traffic data is genuinely better than what Maps gave me, probably because its crowdsourced from actual people driving actual roads right now instead of whatever satellite data Apple licensed. Downside: the voice is a bit much if youre not into being told "youve reached your destination, drive safely!" in a chipper robot voice every single time.
Nokia Maps: technically its called Nokia Maps but it only half-exists on iOS right now, its mostly just a website (m.here.net if I remember the address right) that you can save to your home screen so it looks like an app. It's fine. Its not great. Points for trying I guess, but this felt like the least finished of the bunch, which is funny because Nokia's actual mapping data is supposedly some of the best in the industry.
Bing Maps: I didnt even bother installing a separate app for this, just used bing.com/maps in Safari. It looked like a website from 2011 pretending to be an app, which I suppose is exactly what it was. It worked fine for looking things up but I wouldnt want to navigate with it live while driving.
Google Maps in Safari — this is the one that actually made me a little sad, honestly. Its just… good? Its the same Google Maps we all had memorized on the old iOS Maps app, just wrapped in a browser tab instead of a native icon on the home screen. No turn by turn without a hack, and it doesnt run in the background, but the actual map data, the search, the transit directions, none of that ever should have gone away. I keep hearing rumors that Google's building a real standalone Maps app for iOS and honestly I hope thats true, because right now this feels like using a good tool with one hand tied behind your back.
None of these are actual replacements yet, not the way the old built-in Google-powered Maps was before Apple pulled the plug on it for iOS 6. Theyre stopgaps, exactly like Cook called them. But its a little wild to me that "here are four other companies apps you should use instead of ours" is an actual sentence a CEO wrote and Apple published on its own website. I dont think Ive seen that before. Not sure I will again anytime soon either.
Anyway. My actual verdict, for what its worth: keep Waze on your home screen, bookmark maps.google.com in Safari for anything complicated, and just wait it out on the rest.