People Have Begun to Love Apple’s Most Hated Product

You get lost driving to a party and there is a chance someone will ask, “Why, did you use Apple Maps?”

After its 2012 launch, Apple’s road-atlas app quickly routed itself into hot-mess territory. Grand Cayman lacked roads. New York’s Manhattan Bridge looked like a roller coaster. Officials in Australia warned that some of its navigation flaws were “potentially life threatening.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook issued a rare apology to customers and fired his head of software. The company then spent years trying to fix the service. 

Now, according to customers and user-experience analysts, it has. Some users are finding reasons to switch to Apple Maps, including its clear public transit directions and its visually appealing design.

While Apple might not need the app to sell any more iPhones, the company’s lofty ambitions with cars and augmented-reality headsets depend on maps people actually like using.

“Maps has come a long way, and people have noticed,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software, said during the company’s 2020 Worldwide Developers Conference.

Jason Rabinowitz was so incensed after the introduction of Apple Maps he switched to Android, to more easily use Google Maps.

That didn’t last. The 37-year-old airline-industry analyst moved back to an iPhone in 2015. As a New Yorker, he relies more on transit directions than driving directions. A few years ago, after Apple promoted some new transit features, he gave Apple Maps a try and the results surprised him.

He now thinks Apple Maps suggests creative, faster routes and manages the unpredictability of subway outages better than Google does. He recommends it to friends and family who visit.

Rabinowitz also likes Apple Maps’ cleaner transit view versus the more cluttered design of Google Maps.

He calls Google’s transit layer “sinfully ugly to look at.” But he does still use Google Maps for driving.

Playing catch-up

While Apple Maps comes preinstalled on all iPhones, the overwhelming majority of iPhones in the U.S. have Google Maps downloaded as an alternative, according to Canalys. To get people to open Apple Maps, Apple had to adopt what was already popular in Google Maps, such as a street-view feature. Apple said at its developer conference in June that users would be able to use maps offline, another feature Google has offered for years.

But some visual effects, such as 3-D flyover views of cities, first appeared in Apple Maps.

Google Maps has also evolved, with features such as an immersive 3-D view that lets you check what places look like at different times of day, and an AR tool for finding nearby shops, restaurants and other points of interest.

The biggest competitive advantage Apple Maps has over Google is its deeper integration in the iPhone. Any iOS service that requires directions—from finding restaurants in Yelp to locating AirTags in Find My—uses Apple Maps. Users can’t change that.

“People are inherently lazy and form habits around default options,” says Peter Ramsey, a user-experience consultant who has written about design differences between Apple and Google Maps. “For a long time Apple Maps was so bad that people proactively switched to Google Maps, but as the experience of Apple Maps improved, there was less incentive to make that default-breaking action.”

Style points

Jane Natoli,

“It made me kind of revisit and rethink some of my prior assumptions about it,” Natoli says. “Whatever initial reputational hurdles that Apple Maps faced, I think they’ve jumped over those.”

Outside the airport, Natoli likes Apple’s design and finds directions easier to read, especially street names. On Google Maps sometimes it’s difficult to figure out the street name, no matter how closely you zoom in, she says.

“Google is showing me restaurants, bars and other things, but I’m not necessarily looking for that,” she says.

Angelica Nguyen, a 22-year-old who recently graduated from Georgia Tech, shares a similar sentiment. At night while driving, she finds that the roads are easier to look at on Apple Maps, and there are fewer points of interest cluttering her view.

“Apple’s really good at making things look pretty,” Nguyen says.

Far from perfect

Some iPhone users will still grumble about Apple Maps for the foreseeable future—especially when they feel like it is being pushed on them.

Laura Pladziewicz, a 23-year-old costume-design student, says she has been led astray by Apple Maps as she walks around Boston. She grew up in the metro area but doesn’t know the city itself that well. She defers to Apple Maps because it is the default, and she admits she isn’t motivated enough to download the Google Maps app. 

“Even though it keeps wronging me, I’m used to reaching for that,” she says of Apple Maps. She does, on occasion, look up stuff on Google Maps in her phone’s web browser.

Noah Abdelaziz, a 25-year-old law student, rented a car in Los Angeles this summer to get to and from his internship. It has CarPlay, Apple’s in-vehicle platform that lets drivers use iPhone apps and services through the car’s display. When Abdelaziz connected his iPhone, it automatically displayed Apple Maps on the home screen.

To avoid gridlock, he says Apple Maps would take him through residential neighborhoods with stop signs, which he believes added time to his commute.

His internship ends soon. After almost a month and a half on CarPlay, he has discovered how to use Google Maps on it.

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Write to Ann-Marie Alcántara at [email protected]