Taking The “Smart” Out Of Smartphones

Apple made a dumb move. What could be its dumbest yet.

Yes, the initial furor over the inaccuracy and sloppiness of Apple Maps has arguably more to do with how uncharacteristic it is for Apple, a company that’s done seemingly everything right in computing over the past 10 years, to mess up. It’s as though the bright, beautiful, popular, all “A+” prom queen suddenly and spectacularly bombed an important test. Or at least received a “C minus.”

Google Android fanboys (Fandroids) are also looking pretty smug these days, and why shouldn’t they? There’s of course a certain amount of schadenfreude behind the repeated nitpicking over just how many failings Apple Maps has evidenced so far in its short time since being publicly foisted upon all Apple device users that upgrade to iOS 6.

There’s also little doubt that Apple Maps will get better. Even cutting through the unusually high degree of corporate spin bullshit that Apple offered in the immediate wake of the mapocalypse, it’s clear that the company – slammed now by the media and power users alike for the shoddy quality of its maps offering – is busting its balls to get Apple Maps into at least a semi-functional state. How long this will take is anyone’s guess, but the people that have experience in digital mapping aren’t optimistic there will be a quick fix.

Acknowledging these points and further, even giving Apple the benefit of the doubt, I fear that the true extent of wound the company has inflicted upon itself and users with Apple Maps has yet to be fully realized.

This is because it is impossible to overstate how fundamental maps are to consumers’ expectations of a mobile device these days.

It’s a map, map, map, map world.

Most smartphone users in the U.S. and an increasing number in Europe use maps (or more specifically, location-based services) on their mobile devices, according to studies.

More importantly for Apple, its mobile device users are more apt to use maps than users of any other mobile device platform (at least in Europe), even Google Android.

Given those trends, and given the increasing competition between Google and Apple in mobile (and therefore, computing in general), it arguably actually made sense for Apple to attempt a mobile map offering of its own.

In fact, Apple had a ripe opportunity to begin steering its fanatically loyal and increasing pool of users toward an in-house service, where it could control the experience and collect more usage data and benefit financially from the mass, forced switchover to maps of its own making, had it been done correctly, or at least not completely backasswardly.

Unfortunately, as Apple and users have discovered, digital mapping is a core competency, a service that’s widely used and, when it works, undoubtedly contributes to a consumer’s benefit, but which cannot be easily imitated and which is wielded as a competitive advantage by those businesses that possess established, fully developed versions – in the mobile maps world, namely Google and Nokia.

And as maps become more and more a central part of smartphone apps (see Instagram’s move to introduce a visual Photo Map, Apple’s own integration of maps in iPhoto and Amazon’s new Nokia-powered Amazon Maps API), the reliability and accuracy of said maps become all the more critical.

5 million time bombs

The final ingredient that indicates Apple Maps is a tempest in a teapot is time. Stir all of the above and leave to boil.

Because while power users and tech bloggers were gleefully pointing out and linking to all of the myriad inaccuracies found in Apple Maps around the globe, consumers were still lining up in record numbers to purchase the iPhone 5, which ships with iOS 6 and Apple Maps by default, and which very few consumers are going to have the technical knowhow or time or want to switch back to iOS 5, or even pin Google Maps to their front screens as a stopgap. Few are going to even know that these are options for mitigating the Apple Maps disaster.

Even if they do, there’s still no way to make Google Maps, Bing Maps or any other maps app the default option on an Apple mobile device running iOS 6, unless the owner is up for jailbreaking their iPhone (or iPad). What this means on a practical level is that every link to a physical address that an iPhone user opens on their phone – be it an address that was sent to them via email, through an invitation, even within a popular app like Yelp or OpenTable or Fandango or Foursquare – will now automatically launch and appear within dreaded Apple Maps. There’s no escaping it.

To be clear, that auto-opening feature and inability to reset the default maps app was always the case before on Apple devices, except that Apple always used Google Maps, which worked so well most users didn’t even question it.

Put another way, Apple’s notoriously strict, top-down control and inflexibility of its consumers’ user experience is fine, as long as that experience actually works decently (or better).

Now, Apple has placed in each of those consumers’ hands a ticking time bomb. Apple Maps may work most of the time for most of those users. Maybe a few will luck out and have no problems with the service whatsoever, or Apple will be able to miraculously fix all of the major problems in time to prevent a few of those users from ever encountering them in any significant way.

But for the majority of these new iPhone 5 users – a significant portion of whom are likely to be first time iPhone and perhaps even Apple users whatsoever – they will eventually run into a serious and frustrating Apple Maps glitch that will hinder, or even prevent them from doing something they wanted or needed to do; from getting to somewhere they needed to go in the time that they needed to be there.

So although the cries that Apple maps is a danger to public health and safety may be a bit overstated, the actual impact on Apple’s business has only been underestimated.

Consumers, especially first time Apple users, will now have cemented in their brains the impression that Apple Maps – and by extension the company and its products themselves – are unreliable and not to be fully trusted. Or, at the very least, that Apple now produces questionable products and services. The company’s once seemingly iron-clad reputation for excellence has cracked ever so slightly, and the crack will only widen as competitors – Microsoft Windows Phone and Google Android – step up their game in the mobile hardware and software markets and offer consumers more enticing options to switch. Oh yeah, and those guys tend to have maps that work, too, which they have only been too keen to point out amid the Apple Maps mess.

Worse for Apple, those consumers, powered by the very technology that Apple has given them, can easily go online and vent with others who have experienced similar or analogous trouble with Apple Maps, amplifying and exacerbating the extent of the problems that have been reported, as well as the idea that Apple sucks when it comes to geolocational services. (This is a double edged sword in a sense, though, as recurring problems will quickly emerge and Apple will be able to better pinpoint and address them thanks to crowdsourcing.)

It’s the ecosystem, stupid!

Some third-party iOS developers have shrugged off the Apple Maps complaints and negative coverage as a temporary phenomena. But I think they should be more concerned. Users are just as likely to complain to a developer about a crappy app experience caused by Apple Maps as they are to Apple.

More importantly, Apple should be concerned about the impact the maps will have on its ecosystem. With the launch of Windows Phone 8 imminent and Amazon only stepping up its own mobile device line (and reportedly gearing up to launch a smartphone of its own soon), apps developers, especially those of apps that rely heavily on geolocation experiences, will now have other platforms with more accurate maps to consider building for instead of Apple. Apple is rightly proud of its ecosystem, but when it cut out Google Maps to spite Google, the company did more than cut off its nose to spite its face: It’s also saddled developers with the same inferior maps experience that it’s dumped upon users.

All of this goes to say that Apple has really hurt itself the most here and left the door open for competitors to gain ground, and for consumers and developers to ditch the company’s products and platform.

The dark horses rise

Suddenly, AOL’s 1999 purchase of MapQuest and switch to OpenStreetMap data doesn’t seem so fruitless. MapQuest, like Nokia and Motorola, jumped on Apple Maps complaints to promote its own smartphone navigating features, specifically its free turn-by-turn iPhone app.

AOL could easily license MapQuest out to Apple for a hefty fee to help it improve its own maps service, but Apple would still be left with the extremely difficult task of merging that data with all of the other pricey packages it already bought from TomTom. That is, if Apple remains dedicated to building its own maps service.

More sensibly, MapQuest could also work with Apple’s competitors to improve their maps.

Meanwhile, Google doesn’t seem to be in any big hurry to launch its own standalone iPhone app, and people in the digital mapping space I’ve talked with recently believe that its highly likely Google will actually withhold a native Google Maps app for iPhone and iPad for quite some time in order to spur Android sales.

Furthermore, if Facebook wanted to launch its own phone or mobile device of another sort, doing so while Apple Maps remains a “work in progress” would be a better time than most. Imagine Facebook partnering with Microsoft to launch a phone using Bing Maps, for example. As Facebook more aggressively pursues its mobile user experience, mobile advertising and mobile deals, accurate, reliable local data will become increasingly important to the company. And if Apple Maps isn’t up to the task of providing that, perhaps a Facebook phone will become a more appealing, maybe even imperative, route for the company to take.

What could prove to be the worst aspect of Apple’s timing with its spectacular maps failing is the rise of specialized third-party, consumer and business facing digital maps publishing outfits like MapBox, which are now poised to coordinate in an effort to improve the OpenStreetMap data set and user experience, then turn around and use it to build their own stand-alone apps – HTML5-based apps in many cases, which will allow them to bypass the Apple App Store. If other apps companies and businesses that formerly relied on Apple Maps instead route their geo-needs through these outfits and through OpenStreetMap in general, Apple’s investment in maps will have been for naught, an immense waste of money, time and resources.

It’s been clear for some time, especially to those in the geolocation space, that having good map data is crucial to future success and development of mobile devices and their ecosystems. Maybe it seemed clear to Apple, too, which is why it tried to free itself of a dependency on Google for map data.

But good map data isn’t something you can fake. Rather, bad map data isn’t something that you can gloss over with platitudes and 3D map effects.

The bottom line is, Apple Maps seems likely to continue to lead users astray for the foreseeable future. Whatever happens, Apple is now going to be known as the company that willingly made its smartphones dumber, which can’t be a good thing for the company, users, or anyone really, except Apple’s rivals.