I tried Apple Maps a few times for turn-by-turn directions. Didn’t work out too well.

When I tried it in my car, it suggested a route I knew was not the best one. My car’s GPS makes the same suggestion, and I ignore it as well, taking a faster alternate route on a road which is not numbered and therefore is not as “visible” to the GPS. But once I start taking the better route, the car’s GPS comes on board and projects that going all the way down that route is in fact best. Not Apple’s GPS: it kept insisting that I take side roads back to the initially suggested route, even after it was clear that this would significantly extend the travel time.

Next, I tried the GPS while walking. One problem I ran into was not necessarily Apple’s fault: construction blocked a road crucial to the route. It actually cut off the road completely, which was very rare. I also noted that even after I went completely out of the suggested path, the GPS did not re-route. Worse, every time time turned of the phone and turned it back on again, the maps app had reset, completely losing my route, forcing me to re-input the route every time I pulled out my phone; the only other solution was to leave the phone turned on in my pocket. Later, after I had finished, I tried it again and the route had not reset when I closed and opened the phone—apparently, it only loses the route when you actually are using it to get directions…

I also found a driving bias in the GPS tracking: while taking the train home, the GPS locator tried to track my route along adjacent roads. If the road veered off, the GPS location would follow the road, until it was clear I was not going that way, whereupon the location would snap back to the rail line, only to snap to an adjacent road the moment one presented itself. Clearly, Apple does this to avoid the turn-by-turn directions from showing you driving through city blocks, making up for GPS inaccuracies. When you’re not driving, though, it creates inaccuracies because of this feature.

The more I see the maps, the more I see bogus locations, most notably numerous instances of a single train station in multiple locations. Worse, Tokyo’s city geography is largely centered around rail lines and stations, but Apple’s map app doesn’t show train lines until you zoom in a certain amount, and doesn’t show train stations until you zoom in almost all the way.

Also, why am I not getting 3D building renderings in downtown Tokyo? It seems that feature is not active in Japan; instead of a 3D Buildings icon, I just get a button with the characters “3D,” and all that does is tilt the map a little. Hardly “3D” anything.

Apple has to do a lot of work on this. If they don’t hire a couple thousand people to do the grunt work on getting these things fixed, then they’re idiots. This will only work well for Apple if, by next year this time, most of the errors are fixed and the functionality improves. Right now, with the iPhone 5 playing catch-up with Android features and the Maps actually going pretty far in the other direction, Apple is in danger of losing the reputation for best quality that is chiefly responsible for so many people reflexively buying the device.