The maps look really nice!  True to the RISK design framework. If you are at all interested in seeing to come to reality, head over the kickstarter page and give them your support!

Check out the Vid below

If this is the case, can Google adjust? Sure, I would bet with a little tweaking of the servers they will be running smooth in a week.  But for now, I’m going to be keeping a close eye out.  You never know, could be even more downloads as non iOS 5 users like myself start using the app.

Here is the description from the site.

Navigate your world with Google Maps, now available for iPhone. Get comprehensive, accurate and easy-to-use maps with built-in Google local search, voice guided turn-by-turn navigation, public transit directions, Street View and more. Use Google Maps to discover great places to eat, drink, shop and play, with ratings and reviews from people you trust. Sign in to save your favorite places and quickly access all your past searches and directions from your computer, right on your phone.

Search
* Find addresses, places and businesses around the world with Google local search.
* Discover places to eat, drink, shop and play, with ratings and local reviews.
* Sign in to sync your searches, directions, and favorite places between your computer and your phone.

Directions
* Get voice guided, turn-by-turn driving directions.
* Find your way by train, bus, subway or walking directions.
* Access live traffic information in cities across the world.

Street View and imagery
* View 360-degree panoramas of places around the globe with Street View.
* See inside more than 100,000 businesses worldwide.
* View high resolution satellite imagery of locations around the world.

Simple and easy to use
* An entirely new Google Maps experience on your iPhone.
* Newly designed and streamlined interface for even easier navigation of your world.
* Use gestures to explore the map and browse results.

And actually, these are good questions to ask despite John Gruber inference that I should be writing disclaimers in my headlines.  Sigh.  Moving on, these are pretty stark numbers and so more information on how they came up with it, where they looking at traffic or application load counts, or could there have been anything else that would make these numbers so stark?

I followed up with Snappli with these points (especially the question about traffic vs app load events) and they responded.

We were keen to provide visibility into actual usage rather than anecdotal evidence. To that end, we were looking to see if we could detect any anonymized traffic from the Apple Maps app on any given day. We were not looking at the total amount of data used by the app. Our goal was to measure popularity, not how data hungry the app was, nor the impact of vector graphics.

Some of you have asked us whether we accounted for variability in traffic over days of the week – the answer is yes, we made the effort to look at usage for the five days before and the five days after a day zero (with day zero being the day each user updated to iOS 6).

Good enough?  Seems data flow has nothing do with it according to Snappli. Still not convinced?  Well lets add to that some data from Google Surveys.

According to Google Surveys, it looks like a 12% drop in usage.  Depending on how you interpret the Snappli data, this does not line up with the drop from 1 in 4 to 1 in 25, but still, significant although at a sample of 1000 and further bia possibility must be questioned since this data is based on people who found the survey and took it.  So I’m not going to put as much faith in the Google data, however, the fact that this survey is also indicated a measurable drop in usage make me more confident that the general point; Map is so bad people are not using it; holds true.

This story has taken a live of its own and I’m sure Snappli will be pressured to provide more raw data to back up their assertions.  Here is a question though, can Google get these numbers as well?  They must know if there has been a raise in the amount of calls from their web based app vs native app.

A company called Snappli, which just launched a few weeks ago (see coverage here and here) is a free mobile app that helps users stay within their mobile data limits by compressing and optimizing mobile data as well as video — a huge mobile data suck. Today they pulled some pretty interesting data around Google/Apple Maps, based on data from Snappli users in the UK and US.

I’m going to repeat some of the things I said in my first post; why iOS 6 maps is a disappointment, but before I do, I want to repeat a point. When ever a new iphone is released, there tends to be an issue here and there.  Antenna-gate, poor battery performance, crashing, etc..  Also, new features tend to need a little help. Siri was not all the perfect in the beginning… when it worked.  normally its pretty forgivable (except antenna-gate) because even though they almost never admit it, they tend to get things fixed.  However, this time, they have not released something new, but instead replaced something that was working well with something that CLEARLY does not.

Maps on the iphone was the killer app for me.  It was like nothing I have ever seen before with my other smart phones (yes there were smart phones before Apple folks) but the beauty, speed and usefulness of Maps was mind blowing.  Then came GPS, then directions including public transit and traffic.  It was sweet.  Life was good.  Now its sucks.

I’m not even going to start with the lost of public transport, it was there, now its gone.  Done.  No, its search that really bugs me.  I use Google map search A LOT.  And its very good. Not perfect, but very good.  Now when I try a search, like ‘fast food’, I do not get a list of fast food places near me, but places that have ‘fast food’ in their review. Did you know Jamba Joice is fast food?  Yup.  Next time I’m going to try a burger via their drive through.  Worse, its finding places that do not exist anymore, and sometimes gives you the wrong directions on how to get there.  Really!  How can you mess that up?

Oh and traffic.  Fu get a baw it.  I do not like how cluttered Google maps is but at least I can get the traffic info when I need it.  iOS6 maps?  A dotted red line. That’s it.  And not for all roads either.  Nice.  So not only cannot I not always find what I’m looking for, when I find it, IF I find it, it may not be there and I could get stuck in some serious traffic on the way.  Great.

I’m not the only one finding issue with iOS6 maps. There is even a tumbler dedicated to the screw ups.

Now Google is already working on, and most likely already finished with, their own map app.  I’m looking forward to seeing this as well as a jailbreak that will make the Google maps app my default mapping application.  But I would not be surprised if Apple decides to block it via non compete.

The iPhone 5 is a nice phone.  Its lite, the bigger screen looks odd but I’m sure I could get used to it, its SUPER fast, but I have no plans of getting one till mapping is sorted out.  I just hope Apple does not do something duchbaggery like killing support for the original Google Maps.  Hey, they might!  You never know.   And you know, that could push me over to Android.

“Apple went out and partnered with the weakest player,” he said. “They’re now coming out with the lowest, weakest data set and they’re competing against Google, which has the highest data set. What’s going to happen with the Apple maps, is that you’re literally not going to find things. When you do find them, they might be in the wrong place or position geographically. And if you do have it, the route to it may not be the optimal route.”

This lines up with what I have found when I finally got the beta working and tested it.  Shame.  Right now I rely on google map search to find almost anything and it works great.  For driving directions I use motionX which is a great turn by turn navigation app.  I do not know what motionX uses for search, but I really hope its google.

I have a hard time imagining that Apple is not aware of this limitation and thus must have a plan in place to try to improve the dataset, but I imagine this will take time.  In that time they may manage to piss off a number of users like myself who fell in love with Maps before anything else on the iPhone. In fact, it was Maps on the iPhone 1 that really impressed me, impressed me enought to become an iphone fan boy.

I still have hope though.  One of my MAJOR complaints with google maps on the iphone is how messy the traffic display is.  If you need to see what is going on with the freeways, I do not need to see every little side street as well making it almost impossible to see what is going on at a quick glance.  I have not see a good screenshot to see what this will be like, so I guess I have to wait to see this in action to really know.

Graphics aside, I’m expecting a pretty strong backlash from people complaining about poor search results and perhaps sub par navigation based on what I’m reading.  And who knows?  That might be enough to move a few people to Android.  Might be for me.  We’ll have to see.  In the meantime, no iOS upgrades for me thanks.  I wonder of one day they will simply cut off google for older iphone users?  That would really s&*k.

“Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you’ve been,” said Pete Warden, one of the researchers.

Credit to Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden for breaking this.

They also created an app to view this data.  Get it here..

petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker

This is Mac only at the moment. Once someone writes a script for PC I’ll post it up.

Below is a video where they talk about this during the Where 2.0 conference.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GynEFV4hsA0

Based on the report, the map will respect orientation if you have compass support, as well as rotate using multi touch, but what is REALLY exciting is the ability to keep most of places you visit in cache down to the building detail.  So image having an Android tablet with Maps 5.0 without cell support; you can basically load up your city and outlining area and you good to go. Going to a new area? Once you get in town, stop by the nearest cafe ( or heck even Mc Donald’s have wifi) and download the city.  Done!  Sweet.

Although you can run this on Android 1.6, you really need a Droid or better.

Now will we see something like this for iPhone?  Sigh.. Not anytime soon, but there is no reason why we could not, its just a question of software.  But who is going to write it?  Apple.  Why should they?  But I know who might.  MotionX with the MotionX-GPS App.  Here is hoping!!  But till then, I will check my Droid everyone looking for Maps 5.0.  MMmmm..

But let me know people, is this new?  Have I just not noticed.  If it is new, then I wonder it its part of the Latitude rollout. Would make sense if it was.