An open letter to Apple regarding Maps
It’s been years since Apple Maps first rolled out with iOS 6. The service has been continuously improving, and it’s now about to turn 3 this year.
The Maps in Taiwan is recently integrated with data from Yelp and TripAdvisor, adding more venues visible on the map. That’s a great move. It can finally provide more and better POIs with ratings and user photos.
But those newly-added venues are unable to be searched, even though it is just visibly placed on the map. The root cause is that the search results are from AutoNavi/Amap (高德地图), a map provider from China but is irontically selected as the map source in Taiwan.
AutoNavi gives unbelievalbe terrible map data in Taiwan. The venue infos from AutoNavi are usually wrong or incomplete. And it often returns irrelevant search results, making search useless and unhelpful.
This has been bothering and annoying since Apple Maps launched. Now that you’ve have Yelp integrated, it’s time to wave farewell to AutoNavi as a map provider in Taiwan.
Dear Apple: get rid of AutoNavi. It only ruins your product and makes it suck.