This may just be my bubble, but even among my iPhone-owning friends, I haven't seen a single person use Apple Maps in Europe, so I wouldn't be surprised if the efforts to improve the map data have been more focused on the US.
replyIt’s quite good in both Spain and UK. Better at public transport than Google Maps.
replyI’m in Europe. I use it as part of Apple CarPlay for all my navigation and I think it’s much better than Google Maps (for car navigation, at least)
replyApple Maps is absolutely very late to the game when it comes to road closures. Google Maps somehow always knows which roads are closed, even if for a few minutes.
replyBecause users on Waze report it to them for points
replyReally depends on where you are in Europe. Out here in the boonies of Portugal, it ’s excellent if you’re driving a 4x4 pickup truck, which is the only vehicle of mine I use it with, as it picks very direct routes, which often involve ridiculously steep muddy dirt tracks, very narrow bridges, and generally just very underused farm tracks.
replyI tried using it in Bosnia, once, and it decided to use an abandoned airfield landing strip as a shortcut. Wild stuff.
This is my exact experience, but with Google Maps. Constantly suggesting gravel (or worse) side roads instead of highways and hallucinating multiple turn lanes etc on a country road about 1 car wide. It's been a few years, but I still remember the time I was in Berlin and buses didn't run due to bad weather, but I had a flight to catch so I had to walk to the Tegel airport and the route Google maps recommended ended up being quite an adventure, having to crawl through a hole in a linked fence on an unlit dead-end road next to the airport.
replyIn the Balkans, both Apple Maps and Google Maps are completely lost.
replyI frequently drive through Serbia/Bulgaria/Montenegro/Macedonia, and if you ever do, do yourself a favor and install something OpenStreetMap-based.
Otherwise, you will be missing new motorways, get thrown on unpaved roads, or even asked to drive on roads that just do not exist anymore.
So it was at least concrete / tarmac instead of mud?
replyConcrete. Used the opportunity to do some doughnuts before continuing on our journey.
replytbf google maps are absolutely shit for car navigation.
replyGerman here and me and my wife almost exclusively use Apple Maps, mainly because it looks and feels nicer. The differences in navigation are miniscule, but if we want to really check the traffic before we start we do a quick glance at Google maps.
One difference in navigation we noticed is, that Apple Maps gives some small local streets - those just one revel above "Feldwege" (agricultural/forestry roads) - more weight than they should have. They are not really "single track" (almost unheard of in Germany) but come close, with no lane delineation dashes, etc.
replyEuropean here. Been using Apple Maps exclusively for the best part of a decade now.
replyEurope here. We have a friend who always gets lost and for that we call him "Apple Maps".
replyI've used it quite a lot in Europe - specifically for walking directions in cities. I prefer Apple Maps for walking directions, especially paired with the watch - the data is good and the UX with the watch is excellent.
replyI'm from Europe and I use it 99% of the time. I find the UI in satnav mode much better (cleaner and readable) than the one Google Maps has. The only time I use Google Maps is when I really want to find something that's not in Apple Maps or when I want to read reviews without fumbling with the web browser.
replyThe reason is that Google are highly commercialized first on thier maps, while Apple focused on major markets. E.g. I can remember the times like 2017, when Apple maps was as rocky as possible, but they were working fine in Shenzhen with matching chines to transcriptions, while Google maps sucked at scale there.
replyHere in the UK, Apple maps is the only app I use. I dont even use the inbuilt car gps.
replyHere in the north east of Scotland, I have to switch back and forth between Google Maps and Apple Maps. Apple Maps provides vastly superior residential navigation (it understands that many houses only have names, not numbers, and knows what those names are), but commercial information (where to find a café, are they open, etc.) is often incomplete or outright missing. It seems like Apple have coughed up for POI licensing from OS Maps or similar, but they're limited to whatever business information they can get from Yelp.
replyI changed to it for car navigation. It's a less cluttered interface and integrates better with voice control than Google maps. I still use Google to find out what's around me in a city, which is probably where the money is.
replyI can’t reply to sibling comment, but the Apple Maps native integration in the Apple ecosystem is far far ahead of Google’s. Their CarPlay, Watch, notifications, island etc integration shows how all apps should feel, but not even Google can be bothered to have the integration right.
replyto be frank, I have a feeling that Google has more / better data.
in Japan apple maps is commonly used.
replyDo you have a source that supports this claim?
replyI haven’t come across anyone using Apple Maps while living in Japan, most seem to use Yahoo! Maps or Google Maps.
Outside of the US Japan is the most saturated Apple's market
replyIt's sub par to google maps. As much as I would like to use it in Japan, but it is crappier than Google.
replyNoone in my circle with iphone uses it. Most of people are using Yahoo maps, which is way better than google and apple maps combined.
I use it all the time, because its driving directions interface is so much better than Google, it's not even funny. But it is overall worse than Google Maps.
replyAnd they are planning to make it even worse with ads, so.
Well, back in the days, it took Apple 3 years to fix umlauts in PDF documents with VoiceOver. It is pretty much normal that you're being treated as a second-class user if you are not residing in the US. It is a form of digital colonialism. Learn english, move to the US, or suffer the death of a thausand cuts.
replyThe interface and the direction instructions on Apple Maps are way ahead of Google Maps. The app performance is also much smoother / snappier, it connects to the car instantly and reliably, where with Android Auto it’been always waiting and pain. But the accuracy of maps is indeed worse.
replyHowever my biggest gripe with Apple Maps in Poland is that Siri does not understand Polish and cannot be told to navigate to a Polish address. It just can’t understand the street and city names :(
Btw: I haven’t counted the times Google Maps wanted me to go through the worst possible traffic jam (where the traffic jam was not visible on the map) or a closed road. I guess it just happens with every navigation system that errors happen.
It does not understand English either :)
replyVery regionally dependent.
replyAround here (Long Island, New York, USA), it’s better than Google Maps. I get to compare a lot, because I have a friend that uses GM, and constantly sends me Google Maps universal links.
I hear that it is a lot less effective in rural areas, though, and I think Google Street View is better than the Apple variant.
Apple Maps only works well in North America, possibly just the US. The same way a lot of happy paths in Apple products are designed for California/Single Culture/Single Language/Single Residence.
replyI'm using almost exclusively Apple Maps in Poland and never had any issue (that I remember). Your mileage may vary and so on.
replyAnecdotal evidence, but I do use Apple Maps in Poland and they work just fine for me, I guess the mileage may vary.
replySo does my father - but then again, it is important to remember the context. It's not going to be an issue if you only drive in big cities or on main roads. The only time I really need to use GPS to navigate is going out into the complete boonies, and Waze does that expertly. Apple Maps, meanwhile, helps me remember my Mercedes' stock navigation, which is forever locked in 2011 and runs in 256 colors. :-)
replyI kind of have the opposite experience, and really only use maps to find streets within the city limits. The country is easy to navigate with the road signs you see along the way, and it's more enjoyable to navigate that way than following a nagging app.
replyWe might be kind of lucky in New Zealand with the yellow AA signposts at every intersection in the country telling you the nearest towns/communities and their distances in every direction.
They do work for me either, but I have learned to double check the locations of POIs with Google Maps to make sure I’ll arrive at the correct place.
replyPersonally I doubt they test the hardware outside an air conditioned and dust less office in California.
replyI made the mistake of trusting Google Maps with driving directions in Sicily, and it always sent me down tiny single lane (but two way) roads because they were "better" by the algorithm. That taught me to trust my gut and follow the highways/main roads rather than use any shortcuts that an algorithm can conjure up. (I'm sure this has relevance in the age of LLMs).
replyThese reports seem unhelpful unless you specify the date at which you had this experience, as this thread is about continuous improvement over time.
replyWell, even generally much better Google maps sometimes tries to force me through unpaved field roads with unavoidable damage to normal cars. Or create absolutely ridiculous 'shortcuts' that save 5 metres but I should exit busy main road to join it again 100m later, spending few minutes trying to join back. Or lead me through forbidden/one way roads from wrong direction that are like that permanently since forever.
replyGenerally they are fine, but not literally in every aspect in every place, Europe or not.