A Map App, as Sleek as iPhone 5, Is Often Off - New York Times

Last week, I used ’s new Maps app on my to guide me to a speaking engagement.

The GPS navigation screen was clean, bold and distraction-free. The voice instructions spoke the actual street names. The prompts gave me just the right amount of time to prepare for each turn.

There was only one problem: When the app told me that I had arrived, I was sitting in a random suburban cul-de-sac. Children were playing in the front yard, the sky was a crisp blue, and I was late for my talk.

As almost everyone knows by now, that’s not an unusual tale. Horror stories about Apple’s maps â€" and ridicule â€" are flooding the Internet.

The iPhone’s old mapping app was powered by . But in the new iOS 6 software for iPhones and iPads, Apple replaced Google’s maps with its own, built from scratch.

Unfortunately, in this new app, the Washington Monument has been moved to a new spot across the street. The closest thing Maps can find for “Dulles Airport” is “Dulles Airport Taxi.” Search for Cleveland, Ga., and you’ll wind up right smack in Cleveland, Tenn. Riverside Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla., is in the right place but the wrong decade; it became a Publix supermarket 11 years ago.

And on, and on, and on. Entire lakes, train stations, bridges and tourist attractions have been moved, mislabeled or simply erased. Satellite photo views consist of stitched-together scenes from completely different seasons, weather conditions and even years. The point-of-interest data, in particular, seems to be incomplete or flaky, especially overseas (many snarky examples at theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com).

The most stunning new feature, Flyover, offers interactive, photorealistic 3-D models of major cities â€" but some scenes have gone horribly wrong. The Brooklyn Bridge has melted into the river, the road to the Hoover Dam plunges straight down into a canyon and Auckland’s main train station is in the middle of the sea.

In short, Maps is an appalling first release. It may be the most embarrassing, least usable piece of software Apple has ever unleashed.

Yes, it adds spoken turn-by-turn directions, auto-rerouting and a 3-D view of your route, all of which the old app lacked. Its design is elegant, smart and attractive. Flyover is neat. And Maps works beautifully with Siri; setting a destination is as easy as saying, “Give me directions to the White House,” and off you go. The spoken instructions continue even if you turn off the screen.

But Maps is missing Street View, which lets you see street-level photos of any address (it has taken Google’s photo cars five million miles of driving through 3,000 cities in 40 countries to build it). It’s also missing public transportation guidance; where Google’s maps could show you what buses or subways to take, the new app just hands you off to a list of independent bus and train schedule apps.

And while you’re navigating, you can’t zoom out from that spare, elegant routing screen to look ahead at your itinerary â€" to pick a better route on your own, for example. You can tap an Overview button for that kind of map, but now you’re flipping between two displays.

As the magnitude of Mapplegate (as one of my readers calls it) became clearer, I had three questions.

First, why did Apple jettison Google’s map service, which is polished and mature? Second, how did Apple and its squad of perfectionists misfire so badly? Third, what exactly is the underlying problem, and how long will it take to fix?

After poking around, here’s what I’ve learned.

First, why Apple dropped the old version: Google, it says, was saving all the best features for phones that run its software. For example, the iPhone app never got spoken directions or vector maps (smooth lines, not tiles of pixels), long after those features had come to rival phones.

The even greater issue may be data. Every time you use Google’s maps, you’re sending data from your phone to Google. That information â€" how you’re using maps, where you’re going, which roads actually exist â€" is extremely valuable; it can be used to improve both the maps and Google’s ability to deliver location-based offers and advertising.

Apple, of late, has been disentangling itself from Google. (It also eliminated the YouTube app from iOS 6, although Google quickly released a free downloadable app.) So when it came time to renew its contract, Apple declined. It was no longer interested in supplying so much valuable user data to its rival.

To build its replacement, Apple licensed data from other companies.

It bought map data from TomTom, which also supplies maps for BlackBerry, HTC and Samsung phones, and even parts of Google Maps.

Apple got restaurant and store listings from Yelp, traffic data from Waze and so on â€" more than two dozen sources in all, Apple says.

The resulting ocean of information is many petabytes of data (one petabyte is a million gigabytes, if you’re scoring at home). Well over 99 percent of it, Apple says, is accurate.

Unfortunately, when the overall data set is that huge, even half a percent of faulty data means a lot of flaws. And the trouble is, you never know when you’re going to encounter one. One wild goose chase, and you’ll find it hard to trust the software again.

So Apple has written a beautiful, well-designed app â€" and fed it questionable data. It’s as though you just got a $1,500 professional coffee maker and then poured moldy beans into it.

So where are we, then?

Since the data is all online, Apple can introduce fixes instantly as they’re made, but “it’s not going to change by Friday,” says a product manager. That’s because, in general, the fixes have to be made one at a time, by hand.

Within the app, the prominent Report a Problem button offers one-tap options like “Pin is at incorrect location” and “Place does not exist” (don’t you hate when that happens?). Apple also learns from the location data that pours in from those millions of iPhones as they roam.

Apple passes the error reports to TomTom or whichever data vendor is responsible. Eventually, the vendor makes the correction, and hey, presto: Maps gets better.

Apple acknowledges the stumble. “We own this; we manage the vendors. This is no one’s issue but ours,” an Apple executive told me. And it vows to pour as much time and manpower into repairing Maps as it takes.

Unfortunately, making Apple Maps reliable and complete will take a very long time. (Google’s maps were pretty poor when they started out, too â€" in 2005.)

In the meantime, while Apple’s gaffe might make good entertainment, it’s not the edge of the world; there are plenty of alternatives.

You can still use Google’s maps â€" on the Web. Visit maps.google.com and accept the offer to create a Home-screen icon for you. You won’t get spoken directions, but you’ll get written directions, public transportation details, live traffic reports and, of course, Google’s far superior maps and data. (In two weeks, you’ll be able to get Street View this way, too, says Google.) And you can install the Google Plus Local app for full access to Google’s more complete database of shops and businesses.

You can also use someone else’s app. Many good ones cost money, but the MapQuest and Waze apps are free and offer spoken directions; Waze also incorporates real-time information about traffic jams, accidents and speed traps, collected by thousands of iPhones and Android phones on the roads.

If you can wait a couple of months, you’ll be able to install Google’s own maps app; Google is busily readying one for the iPhone and .

Finally, of course, you could just get an Android phone.

But if you’re an iPhone owner, it’s probably best to let Apple’s Maps app ripen in a corner for a while. Apple’s Web site may call it “the most beautiful, powerful mapping service ever.” But for now, it’s best considered “the most beautiful, entertainingly addled mapping service ever.”