Apple maps is better for me in larger cities for walking directions or for finding local restaurants and shops. I still prefer google maps for driving.
I switched to Apple Maps because Google Maps lies too much and gives worse directions.
I decided to start walking to one of my jobs. I didn’t know the way walking since I always took the train. Google told me it would take about 45 minutes. It took nearly an hour, and Google had me take all these back roads I would never be able to remember.
The next week, I tried Apple Maps. It told me it would take 55 minutes, and gave me this very clear route that was easy to remember. And it did little things, like have covered roads be a slightly different color than regular roads.
I’m not sure how it is for driving, but for walking directions, Apple Maps is so much better.
It has become my “dad time” Sunday morning activity to submit corrections to Apple Maps in my area. The area where I live was recently designated a national park so we receive a ton of tourists and this is like my little way of helping
The one thing I don't like about its navigation mode is that it can't be used for anything else at the same time. If I start walking directions to a restaurant and then someone asks me what time it closes or if there's a bar nearby then I have to cancel the navigation or use a different app to look that up.
I actually like the interface better in Apple Maps.
I agree - It's way easier to read. I was driving through Chicago recently and found Waze was really hard to read when there's a lot of exits happening all at once and it caused me to miss my exit. I'm neutral on Google Maps readability - Sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's not.
Google is far more updated and capable though
Tend to agree - Also, Google Reviews are far more trustworthy than Apple Maps' Yelp integration. If Apple Maps switched off Yelp or offered the ability to connect to Google Reviews, I'd consider moving over entirely. The other issue with moving over though is that everyone else uses Google Maps, so I have access to quite a few crowdsourced Google Lists on Google Maps.
I mainly use Waze for distance driving to monitor for po' po', Google Maps for reviews and for having an offline map downloaded and Apple Maps when I'm driving to someone's house whose address I have stored in a contact card. Each has their uses but at least Apple Maps is finally getting offline maps this fall.
@red__raven I haven’t used Google Maps in a long time. What really won me over several years ago was Apple Maps would say something like “Go past this light and then at the next one, turn right”. Does google do this now?
From my limited exposure, no. It just goes “in x feed turn right”
That’s one other point I’ll give Apple Maps VS Waze/GM. AM shows you the traffic lights before your turn, which helps me know if I should start switching lanes now or later. Otherwise if I change lanes too early, I might be stuck behind people making a right turn.
As is typical with Apple and Apple products/services, it’s the little things that keep me here.
This is my favorite feature over Google Maps, soooo much easier to make your next turn instead of looking for street names while you are trying to drive.
One thing that I absolutely hate about Apple Maps: trying to navigate home after navigating out somewhere. I swear I’ve got to close like 5 layers of garbage context left over from navigating to the first place. What the hell is the point of having a favorite if it’s gonna be hidden when I try to use it?
If I’m trying to navigate home, it’s because I don’t know the best way and I almost certainly used navigation to get where I currently am. So I have this issue almost every single time I use it.
I'm not sure what you mean, did you set your home location in your profile in contacts? That is also an angle of criticism but it exists. For locations in your profile it will always put them in front of everything else.
That’s how I feel as well. I do my best to use it out of principle to stay away from Google services the best I can. My one biggest complaint is that when you’re navigating, Apple Maps takes over your lock screen. I think that’s getting changed in the next iOS release however.
I don’t recall it taking over my Lock Screen, but Apple Maps does lock you out of any interaction with the app while navigating. That can be really frustrating when I’m riding as passenger and want to look up some potential stops en route. Have to cancel my destination just to look at anything else.
The new For You feed now won’t just showcase a range of popular, but diverse, accounts, but will customize its suggestions based on the user’s own “friends of friends” network. That means the content from public accounts that friends of friends follow will be surfaced in the new For You feed. - Techcrunch
Doesnt seem to be active yet, looks like that feature is still closed beta.
I really hope they include an option to customize the For You feed. I don’t want pure recommendations I want a chronological feed with every 3rd post be a recommended one. I don’t understand how zero platforms/apps have a merged feed to have the best of both in one feed
We don’t want you on Mastodon. I don’t mean to offend you, but Mastodon is the way it is. The lack of “smart” feed is a feature. It might be not for you.
I know it’s a feature, and I know people on Mastodon care about it. And because of that it’s not for me. That’s fine. My point was, exactly because Mastodon is not for everyone, there’s no need to be derisive of the people who “flock to yet another corporate social media honeypot.”
Absolutely! The feed isn’t a random mishmash. The natural order in which people post gives the Mastodon feed a very organic feeling. And there is no doom scrolling. You eventually hit the point where you left it last time and there’s nothing more to see. Contrary to how it sounds, it gives you a feeling of satisfaction and closure. Honestly, the algorithmic feeds have done great psychological harm.
You want a corporate entity to recommend things to you based on a closed algorithm you have no control over?
Each to their own and I know a lot of people do it, but that’s really weird to me, absolutely crazy.
In any case, it’s open source so you could probably hire someone to develop that for you if you really wanted. You know, have it serve things up to you that manipulates you to stay on the platform while best aligning with their corporate interests. You do you.
No, I want a communal, collaboratively managed platform to recommend things to me based on an open source algorithm whose behavior I can adjust the way I want. Alas, this just isn’t a thing.
Just amongst the available options, the closed algorithm optimized for engagement has so far been better at showing me interesting things than an unfiltered chronological feed.
Fair, and if I was a little harsh there I apologise. It’s not a thing, and in absence of that the best thing to use is Mastodon which while doesn’t provide recommendations the way you want but at least doesn’t provide recommendations that are biased against your interests.
Years ago, I worked for a company that provided phone location for emergency services (fire, police, medical) to the big 3 cellular companies in the US. It required cell providers to install special hardware; back then, GPS was less ubiquitous, but it (still) suffers from accuracy in urban environments; it doesn’t take much to block GPS signals. Also, you don’t need access to anything more than the service provider’s logs to do trilateration; it’s harder to get GPS data from a phone without having software on the phone. In any case, Google pioneered getting around that by mapping wifi signals and supplementing poor GPS with trilateration, and it was good enough. Even back then, our lunch was being eaten by the cost of our systems, and work-arounds like wifi mapping.
Anyway, fast forward a decade and I’m working for a company that provides emergency support for customers who are traveling, and we’re looking at ways to locate customers’ business phones to provide relevant notifications. One of the issues was that there are places in the world where data connections are not great, and it was not acceptable for us to just ignore clients without data connections. One of the things we explored was called zero-length SMS. It’s what it sounds like: an SMS message with zero-length does not alert the phone, but it does cause a ping to the phone. It was an idea that didn’t pan out, but that’s not relevant.
Cell phones have a lot of power-saving algorithms that try to reduce the amount of chatter – both to reduce load on cell towers, but because all that cellular traffic is battery-intensive. So, if you’re a government trying to track a phone, and you’re working with a cell provider, and you don’t have a backdoor in the phone, then you will be able to see which cell tower the phone last spoke with, but that probably won’t give you very good location data and it may not update frequently. This is especially true in rural environments, where there’s low density and a single cell tower might have a service radius of 3 miles – that’s a lot of area.
If you’re tracking someone by phone, a normal cell connection may not be granular enough. Sending SMSes to a phone can force the phone to ping the tower and give you more data points about where the phone may be, how it’s moving, and so on.If you’re lucky, you can get pings from multiple towers, which might allow you to trilaterate to within a dozen meters.
Push notifications use data, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some of that going on, too. It says “through Apple and Google’s servers” which means they’re talking about the push notification servers and not the phones. Android phones are constantly sending telemetry back to Google, so if that is what they’re doing sending push notifications is probably more useful to them for Apple phones.
The article is light on details, but that’d be my guess. Forcing traffic to get more frequent cell tower pings and more data points for trilateration.
Just been reading up on this, they’re basically using the push device ID to see when certain devices are receiving data and from what apps. It sounds like more work than its worth, but it’s clearly something that’s being used widely.
None of these “Apple bad” types read anything beyond the headline.
Nowadays, anything remotely outrageous or negative is very hastily construed to be “Apple bad, duh” without a second thought. We legitimately can’t have genuine, thoughtful criticism of these companies anymore.
You can de-Google an Android phone with a custom ROM and have a phone that you have control over and know nobody is spying on you by running a firewall on the phone.
Actually, you can, with Lockdown for iOS or Lulu for macOS. There are other alternatives available, these are just a pair of FOSS examples. You can totally block *.apple.com if you really want to.
It’s not quite the same though. With a custom android ROM, you can be pretty confident that everything kernel-and-up is not spying on you. On iOS and macOS, you don’t have the same level of verifiability, as the OS could just circumvent any VPN/firewall you might have configured. They might pinky promise not to, but without running another external firewall it’s not really verifiable.
It said that Google put it in their aggregated report. Not that they disclosed it. There is a big difference between ‘we got 100 requests’ and ‘we got 10 requests for X info, 30 for Y info’.
ETA: I just looked at the data again, it’s broken in to categories like FISA NSL etc, then it just gives a range of requests 0-1000 etc.
You can’t really go anywhere on the internet without using Google in some capacity. Cookies and trackers in all the things. Ads aplenty, and blocking them is perpetually an arms race.
Nah, it can be encrypted. Fuck this bullshit, we have the technology, I shouldn’t need to log into everything or open every 1/5000 apps to get quick cues/updates. Apple needs to fuck off with the spying bullshit, even the governmen itself (lawmakers like Wyden are saying fuck this shit and shining a light+exposing it) is saying enough in the way it can.
Republicans/Democrats/humans who don’t want all their private data becoming endless Kompromat should be united on this, they have a hell of a lot more to hide than any of us singular private citizens
Edit: 💡on second thought, I switched to Never for “Show Previews” and I kinda like the way it keeps me on my toes and attentive to what it could be (anticipatory and curious). Maybe its just as well. Time will tell
This makes no sense whatsoever. I’m not saying anyone should use either, but they’re not the same and just because you need the other account to sign up doesn’t mean it’s the same thing.
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