So Tim Cook wrote us all a letter last Friday. An actual open letter, "An Apple to Our Customers," posted right on apple.com, basically saying: yeah, Maps is bad, we know, hang in there. He told people to go download Bing, MapQuest, or Waze in the meantime, or just use Google Maps through the browser. Which is a wild thing to see a company tell its own customers to do a week and a half after shipping the thing.
I've been sitting on this for a few days trying to decide if it's admirable or just damage control, and honestly I think it's both and I don't think those are mutually exclusive.
Backstory for anyone who somehow missed it: iOS 6 dropped Google Maps as the default and replaced it with Apple's own mapping app, built on TomTom data with this glossy 3D flyover mode that looks incredible in the keynote and then falls apart the second you try to use it for anything real. Whole towns rendered as gray blobs. Landmarks in the wrong spot. That screenshot of the Brooklyn Bridge that got passed around everywhere, where the 3D rendering makes it look like it melted into the East River like a Dali painting. People started calling the whole thing "Mapocalypse," which is a dumb name but I get it.
I preordered the iPhone 5 the day it went up and had it in hand by September 21st, so I've had almost two weeks with this thing as my only phone. My own moment came trying to find a barbecue place I'd been to maybe twice before, off a side street I couldn't fully remember. Old Maps would've just gotten me there. New Maps put the pin two blocks off, on a street that dead-ends into a parking garage, and by the time I'd doubled back and figured out I was in the wrong spot I'd wasted a solid fifteen minutes and my table reservation was gone. Not a huge deal in the scheme of things. Mildly infuriating in the moment, though, especially since I switched phones specifically because I trusted this stuff to just work.
What gets me about the apology isn't the apology itself, it's the list of alternatives Cook included. Telling your own customers to go download a competitor's app, on your own homepage, is not a normal move for Apple. This is a company that doesn't usually admit anything short of total confidence. So either the internal pressure got bad enough that PR just decided the letter was less damaging than another two weeks of bridge-melting screenshots, or somebody actually decided customers deserved a straight answer instead of a spin job. Maybe both again.
I'll say the thing nobody wants to say out loud: turn-by-turn was never really the problem for me. It's fine, mostly. The problem is search. Type in a business name that's a few years old or slightly misspelled and old Maps would usually still find it. New Maps just shrugs. I've started keeping the Google Maps bookmark pinned to my home screen as a web app, which works okay except you lose the blue dot half the time and it doesn't integrate with Siri at all, obviously.
Also, unrelated complaint, but the app icon for the new Maps is genuinely nice looking, this little rendering of the road grid near Apple's old campus. I actually like it more than the old pin-and-compass icon. Doesn't fix anything underneath it, but it's a nice icon on a broken app, which feels like it should be a proverb somewhere.
I don't think this gets fixed in a month. Rebuilding map data isn't like patching a bug, it's slow and mostly invisible progress that only shows up gradually, satellite tile by satellite tile, business listing by business listing. Cook's letter says they're "working non-stop," which is the kind of phrase that means nothing and everything depending on how patient you are. I'm patient about most tech stuff. I was less patient standing on a street corner looking for a rib joint that, according to my phone, did not exist.
Anyway. If you're on iOS 6 and you haven't already, go grab the Google Maps bookmark trick, or just wait for whatever Google ends up shipping as a standalone app, because rumor is they're working on one. Until then I'm just double checking anything that actually matters before I trust the blue dot.