Apple has been working on rebuilding Apple Maps to make it more accurate and detailed. The company says it will roll out to the United States by the end of 2019, and it recently became available for New York (via New York Post).
New York Apple Maps
Apple no longer relies on third parties for its mapping capabilities. This new, rebuilt version of Maps is entirely Apple’s technology. For example, in New York City you can see more details in buildings, parks, walkways, roads, and others. In Central Park you can see features like the Great Lawn, Harlem Meer, and the various baseball fields.
As part of Apple’s efforts, in iOS 13 has a feature in Maps called Look Around. This lets you virtually “walk” down streets to see a pedestrian-level view of businesses in certain locations. Tech analyst Shelly Palmer hopes that Maps will improve, telling NYP:
The bar for Apple Maps isn’t incredibly high — it’s just ‘don’t suck.’ I don’t know anybody that uses Apple Maps on their iOS device. You’re not going to find anybody that’s a serious user of technology that hasn’t replaced Apple Maps with Google Maps.
Further Reading:
[Video Shows Apple’s Look Around is Much Smoother than Google Maps Street View]
What I want more than this is a way to add waypoints to our trips and to choose alternate routes that not among the recommended one. Say I want to travel from Perdition to Palookaville by the of Shelbyville. I don’t want to get directions for two separate trips. I would like to be able to draw on the map with finger or Apple Pencil and have the app snap to the route, that works in my iOS Footpath app.
Absolutely right. Not being able to amend the route by touch (or by Pencil) is the number one reason I turn Maps off completely. Or yell at it to shut up until I can turn it off (yelling is not effective, of course, but it is somewhat stress-relieving). Why the Apple Maps team fails to see this year after year is beyond puzzling, surely there can’t be a patent issue on that feature.
The Map design team are probably the same whitespace challenged folks who do Messages for the Mac. Pressing the Return key sends the message instead of adding a carriage return. Yes I know about Command-Return, does Apple know about Send buttons?