So it's been about two weeks since iOS 6 landed on my phone and about a week since Tim Cook wrote his little apology letter, and I think I've finally made my peace with the new Maps app. Peace meaning: I still use it, but I never trust it completely, the way you'd still ride in a car with a friend who's a decent driver but occasionally forgets which side of the road he's on.
For anyone who's been off the grid, Apple pulled Google's mapping data out of iOS 6 and replaced it with their own thing built on TomTom data and Apple's own 3D flyover renders. And it has been rough. Not "oh the icons look different" rough, but "this bridge appears to be melting into a river" rough. There's a Tumblr going around, The Amazing iOS 6 Maps, that's basically become a public archive of the weirdest stuff people are finding — bridges that dissolve into abstract art when you tilt into 3D view, an airport runway that looks like it's floating in the ocean, whole towns just missing labels entirely. I lost a solid twenty minutes scrolling it on my lunch break last Thursday and laughed way more than I should have, mostly because I recognized some of the same glitches from poking around my own neighborhood.
Cook's letter went out September 28th, and to his credit it wasn't the usual corporate non-apology. He flat out said "we fell short on this commitment" and told people to go grab Bing, MapQuest, or Waze from the App Store, or just use Google's maps through the browser, while his team fixes things. I don't think I've seen Apple point users toward a competitor's product before. Ever. That alone tells you how bad the internal numbers must have looked.
My own low point came Saturday night. I was meeting a friend at a diner I'd been to maybe three times before, and Maps confidently routed me to a spot about four blocks off, in what turned out to be a closed strip mall parking lot at 9:40 pm with nobody around and my phone battery at 22%. Not the end of the world, I found the place eventually by just, you know, looking at the actual street signs like a person from 1995. But it's the kind of thing that makes you second-guess every blue dot after that. Once an app gets something wrong in a way that costs you real time standing in a parking lot, you don't fully trust it again for a while, even after it's "fixed."
Here's my actual take, and I know this isn't a popular one among people who just want Apple to be right: I think this was rushed, and I think it was rushed mostly to get out from under Google rather than because the product was ready. You don't ship something with landmark labels floating in the middle of lakes because your engineering process said "yes, ship it." You ship that because somebody upstairs wanted headlines about Apple owning its own mapping stack, deadline or no deadline. The Yelp integration and turn-by-turn voice nav are genuinely nice when they work, the spoken directions are clearer than what I remember from Google Maps on iOS 5. But nice extra features don't matter much if the base data under them is wrong.
For now my workaround is boring: I've got maps.google.com bookmarked and pinned to my home screen as a web app shortcut, since there's no dedicated Google Maps app for iOS 6 yet (and no sign Apple would even allow one back in, honestly, though I'd bet money we see one eventually if this doesn't get better fast). It loads a little slower than a native app would, and I miss having turn-by-turn there, but at least it won't send me to a parking lot in the dark. I keep the two open pretty much every time I drive somewhere unfamiliar now, one as the "official" one and one as the check.
Small annoyance on top of all this: my mother-in-law, who is not what I'd call a heavy phone user, texted me last week asking why "the map thing" told her the wrong street for her dentist. If it's showing up on her radar, it's not some tech-blog-bubble complaint anymore, it's a real everyday problem for regular people, and that's a much bigger deal for Apple than a bunch of us laughing at melted bridges on a Tumblr.