I think "why did they ship the new maps app before it was ready?" is the most interesting question about this whole debacle.

I don't think they actually gather user-generated map content via iOS maps, so (1) doesn't make much sense to me.

(2) strikes me as weird reasoning. If there's a good argument that Apple needs their own maps, enough to justify the acquisitions, it doesn't seem likely that the project would get dropped.

I don't think (3) makes sense: they cut out critical functionality like public transit in directions. I don't see a reason to ship something which reduces useful features unless there was a very compelling reason.

I think the most likely reason was actually pressure of some kind from Google's side.

> I don't think they actually gather user-generated map content via iOS maps

I've noticed my search suggestions changing from one day to another (including misspellings), so apparently Maps does have some form of crowd-sourcing built in.

There's a place to report errors in address information, pin placement, etc. in the maps app.

(4) Google and Apple couldn't come to terms (or Google refused to provide terms), so Apple put some lipstick on a pig and called it beautiful, knowing (1) would happen as well.

As a product manager, I can't imagine a company being that blind to the real state of the product, so I can't believe (3). Maps is too important for phones today to make (2) believable.

Some aspect of (1) could have influenced what both parties were willing to do in my (4) case. Apple may have said, "It's not worth $XXX million dollars for another contract when we are 50% of the way there, and the last 30% will require a shipped product, anyway, to get all the POI data."

> (3) They didn't realize quite how bad it was. Just because customers started finding hilarious problems on days one doesn't mean they're trivially easy to find. With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.

As a digression: I wonder if the fact that Apple is located in Palo Alto has anything to do with the lack of support for public transportation in Maps? Typically the south bay has a significantly less emphasis on public transport (excepting Caltrain and VTA) when compared to San Francisco. It would certainly be interesting to compare UX experiences of apple devs/testers who commute from SF to Palo Alto vs those who lived close by.

Not Palo Alto, Cupertino, and you might be surprised at how many employees commute by means other than their own cars, but yes, I've wondered myself whether transit directions wouldn't have a had a much higher priority if Apple HQ were located in, say, NYC.

1) In some ways they already do this by collating anonymized crowdsourced data (ex. the overblown debacle over the location cache and the subsequent discovery that they were crowdsourcing traffic data).

2) To my knowledge, this just doesn't happen at Apple for high profile launches like iOS, iPhone, iPad etc. While there are always going to be egos at play in any corporation, the executive team is very solid at Apple and struggles like that just don't get far. Apple demonstrated over and over again that they have no problem killing hardware and software that they feel they must for the sake of progress, or whatever, and you can bet that there's always a team with something at stake when they do that.

3) Given the thoroughness of focus on iOS at Apple over the last 5 years, and maps being a rather major change for a key functionality for iPhones, and any smartphone now really, this seems impossible. What I'm not clear on is why Apple didn't expressly announce the feature as a work in progress, or "beta", that is at the point that it requires real world usage and feedback to bring it up to the standards of, what are now, significantly more mature products.

The Maps app in iOS5 really hasn't changed much since it's launch with the first iPhone while Android, etc. have been able to add features to theirs. My money is on licensing restrictions being the primary culprit behind this and given that Apple's license with Google was up this year, it just seems far too much of a stretch, for the sake of finding any kind of fault in Apple's diamond polished veneer, to assume that Apple had any other intention than wanting to improve the utility of a key mobile computing feature they were otherwise not allowed to do, or were not able to come to agreeable terms with Google when talking about renewing their license. It's unfortunate that it's so significantly lacking in accuracy, but I'm not entirely sure there was much they could do about that before launch beyond removing Maps entirely?