One Google with thousand tentacles...
If you look at their website, Mapbox is all about "live" location data, insights, etc. The days of them just being a provider of nice services built around (mostly) open data are probably over. They have a huge userbase and can leverage all that data to do powerful things.
This is terrible...
The only way they promote themselves is only by comparing DuckDuckGo to Google
The flip side with Mapbox is that they probably weren't collecting any less data either.
I dont see why this was needed - it is a regression in terms of usability and performance (loading performance - cant comment on quality of the maps just yet, but I understand from others that the map data is woeful).
Really disappointed. I used to recommend DDG to everyone, but this feels like a sell-out - without any justification for why they've done it, my mind just leaps to conclusions about marketing and trying to get "cool points".
(I don't work for Apple and I run a competitor to Mapbox.)
And the colours! All features seem to bleed into their low-contrast pastel neighbours.
This doesn't feel like a proper match for DuckDuckGo at all.
Because it sucks. Isn’t that obvious? There’s no point in having a feature that nobody uses. I switched to DDG a few months ago and this has always been the one weakness. This is really good news IMO. Apple maps has come a long long way since launch, and their data is about on par with Google at this point.
You can argue all day that of course it’s still a commercial company. But I’d rather compromise and hitch my wagon to the folks that are outwardly explicitly drawing out their commitment to privacy, whose incentives I understand and trust.
I do believe it when Apple says they're respecting their users' privacy, just like I believe it when DDG says that. But I am disappointed when I see how these companies neglect freedom and how so few of their users care about it.
I tried finding an address recently on Google Maps, and just couldn’t find it, only to discover that that street was added 4 years ago, so ofc Google (with data from 2011) didn’t have it. OSM had it.
No surprise the blog post highlights how easy to use this integration is...in Cupertino.
Not in Portugal, or most places in Europe where I’ve tried it. They are so far behind it’s not even funny.
I know that the quality is not everywhere as good as there, but the quality varies for the other Map products too. So if it 'sucks' or the other thing 'sucks' greatly depends on where you currently are.
Reporting from Washington, DC: nope.
In California maybe.
Everywhere else? Not even close.
Edit: request are succeeding for me now.
The maps themselves are just difficult to visually parse, and unpleasant to look at compared to Google Maps and Apple Maps (which look comparably attractive at a glance). I dunno if that's solvable using a third party OSM service provider or not, but to me it seems like a good enough reason to switch.
Approximately everyone is using a third-party OSM service, since the OSM project does not provide map tiles for general use.
I also strongly disagree on your other criticism of the most common style, but that's a matter of taste. To me, they look more like a proper city map is supposed to look, and provide more detail that's useful for me to orient myself. If I were typically doing long car drives, I might prefer Google, but I don't.
Implementation of OSM stuff is horrible and usability as well. I LOVE free software and my privacy is very important to me - so I switched everything to self-hosted and encrypted solutions. Except maps. I still use google maps for a lot of navigating just because other solutions are really inconvenient to work with.
Edit: which is a fallback to Mapbox, no Apple Maps feature.
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/9km62p/apple_maps_tran...
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs/mapkit_js...
I think it achieves that by leveraging color theory and CSS filters.
Once you try it you cannot go back :)
I am not involved in development nor devs are friends of mine, I just think it didn't get all the exposure it deserves.
PS if you're on chrome, after installing Darker Reader the infamous chrome white flash problem will mess with your eyes... Following thread has a partial solution to that:
Here is how it looks on my machine: https://i.imgur.com/rpCiJSA.jpg
You'll get dark mode everywhere, automatically, with good looking dark colors.
I think it does that by leveraging color theory and CSS filters.
Not over privacy stuff (I don't trust Apple that much either), but because Apple maps just sucks. Unless things changed within the last 4 months, Apple Maps couldn't accurately navigate me from Custer State Park to Mt. Rushmore (which really isn't far).
I have given up on Apple Maps long time ago and I have given up on DDG after many failed attempts.
I am using Qwant https://lite.qwant.com/ which is surprisingly good for general search terms and embarrassing for specialized search terms (like programming and such).
According to Wikipedia, they still pipe your searches through Bing except for FR/DE (though anonymized), and it's not who the backend search engine is there.
I am happily using Firefox, DuckDuckGo, and Apple Maps instead of their Google equivalents—even though I was perfectly happy with them for the most part—just to do what little I can to ensure continued competition in these spaces.
Yeah, Apple Maps isn’t as good as Google Maps in many regards. But it’s been improving, and it’s honestly not that much worse for the overwhelming majority of my use cases, to the point where I don’t even notice except a handful of times per year. And I can always fall back to the Google product if I absolutely have to.
Maybe things changed, but that wasn't that long ago. And we all know that once a product falls (and pretty hard), it is harder to recover.
Maybe 40% of my city is missing (top-20 in the US) including absolutely everything in my neighborhood other than a couple parks and churches. It gets my address to the correct block (between X and Y Aves) but that's it. Some small towns around me barely exist, others are absolutely complete.
You'll probably do ok in SF/NYC/LA/Chicago etc, but it gets really spotty beyond that.
OSM is becoming pretty impressive too. Even smaller towns here in Sweden are decently mapped. A huge difference compared to just five years ago¹, far greater difference than since Apple Maps was launched as far as I can tell. Apple Maps launched in a better state, yes, but not in a good state, and I think it's been moving slowly since then. OSM launched in a minimal state but are moving forward like a maglev train.
¹ Also visualized here: https://labs.mapbox.com/ten-years-openstreetmap/
(We currently use Analytics on our homepage, but have plans to replace that on our next iteration.)
Not even a month ago I made a search for a famous place in Lisbon (you know, big metropolitan area, capital of Portugal, 11th-most populous urban area in the European Union) and Apple Maps didn’t even know it existed. Made the search in DDG and it found it, from where I had to copy the address and manually search for it in Maps.
Or I could’ve used Google Maps in one try, but I genuinely want DDG and Apple Maps to succeed so I keep trying. But please do use the best data of both, don’t replace one with the other.
Isn't that basically just Google Maps? I thought Apple Maps' data was just a subset of Google Maps'.
What does Apple Maps do better? Genuinely curious.
> I thought Apple Maps' data was just a subset of Google Maps'
They must be different datasets; I doubt Google would want to give Apple any data, or data Apple would take it. I will mention that once I have found one place in Apple Maps that was not in Google Maps. It was a small hostel in Europe.
That being said, I still search for places in google maps, and just plug the address into apple maps.
Actions like this, the fact that DDGs core components are still proprietary and the freezing of DuckDuckHack just kinda make me think DDG sometimes cares more about the PR than its users.
Don't get me wrong I do think DDG does a good job at providing a good search engine service that respects its users' privacy. It just bothers me that (almost) no one around here seems to care about freedom.
It's a similar thing with Apple, with the exception that Apple actively goes against even the most basic freedoms by forbidding sideloading (if that's still happening), forbidding the GPL on the App Store and being in control of the whole stack - from hardware to software - on almost every platform they have, amongst others.
I'm not saying you need to love freedom but it's a good thing to have, so why not propagate it alongside with privacy? And if you don't do it for yourself, do it for those who care about their freedom.
I believe it is a user's right to share the software and configuration they use to help out their neighbour and for that they need to be able to share copies of the software.
Lastly, I obviously believe it is a user's right to run the software wherever they want.
So yeah, free software is a right in my opinion, like freedom of information and free speech. Unfortunately, not many companies care about it (yet).
You're also right in the point that DDG not setting OSM as the default map provider won't actually hurt OSM, really. But it does piss me off a bit when a company always talks about how "privacy friendly" and "open source" they are yet they completely dismiss the (related) freedom aspect. Because "privacy" and "open source" are just the buzzwords the media is talking about.
Does DDG not know about freedom? Does DDG not care about freedom? Why? I know they probably have a good reason for that and good intent in what they're doing but without having an answer to these questions, it just looks like they're grabbing the low hanging fruit sometimes.
Google uses my data to target ads at me but doesn’t actually give any of my data to its ad-buying customers. Apple doesn’t do this but is obliged to turn over my iCloud data to the government with a subpoena.
Since this is really the scenario we should be most concerned about and since all tech companies are required to comply with the law it seems to me that the only way to have any meaningful online privacy is to not use cloud services from any vendor.
Apple must of course comply with a subpoena, but it can only hand over data it holds the keys to. The iOS Security whitepaper[1] goes into some details. Any encryption keys that are stored in iCloud Keychain "share[] the security characteristics of iCloud Keychain—the keys are available only on the user’s trusted devices, and not to Apple or any third party." This is used for some, but not all, categories of iCloud data today—iMessage transcripts, for instance, are safe only if you do not use iCloud Backup.
1: https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....
Your post makes it sound like Google targeting ads to you and Apple complying with legal data requests happen with the same frequency, which is obviously false, and definitely is a difference in practical terms for the everyday user.
According to Apple's transparency report[2], they gave data up in 2,088 account requests in the United States in the first half of 2018.
2: https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-request...
I deleted my Facebook account because Facebook actually has sold user data to third parties.
I'm not even sure this level of anonymized usage is possible with google's APIs.
Edit: I just had the experience of trying to use biking directions in google maps the other day. In order to enable actual turn-by-turn directions I had to turn on something called "Web and App activity" which, as best as I can tell, is an unbelievably invasive set of technologies designed to track you across websites, real locations, and non-google owned apps using google APIs.
There's a real and meaningful difference in the amount and depth of the data collected by google vs. its competitors. I think a huge motivating factor for why google collects that data is their ad-driven revenue model.
To tie it back to your original question: Sure we could all just not use cloud services but in the mean time there are clear differences in how vulnerable you are to privacy violations by nation-states through legal means based on how much data various cloud services are actively trying to collect on you.
I agree with you, but Google is way more aggressive in its data collection behavior than apple and i am getting sick of that.
I have been using Google maps this past month and i noticed some dark patterns :
- after getting directions from `your current location` when you deactivate your location services and switch apps, google maps will delete the directions and resets to the page that asks you to chose a `from` location, now you have to give google your current location to get those directions back.
- you cannot get your `current location` without internet enabled, even when you have `location services` enabled.
With iOS I only get iOS or jailbroken iOS. Not really satisfying, but Google made an open source kernel into a proprietary mess of literal spyware.
Are you suggesting Google doesn’t also have to do this?
Seems like you need to store all your data locally or encrypted on your own servers if you really want privacy.
For a long time (in internet time), Apple Maps were clearly inferior to Google Maps.
These days, it's more nuanced. In some geographies they have parity. In a select few, Apple is ahead. For most, though, Google is better.
For speed and privacy reasons, I check Apple Maps first. If I don't find what I'm looking for, then I go to Google Maps and follow up by force-quitting Google Maps when I'm done.
google maps is the only google service i still use on a regular basis because it's clearly better than apple maps for me (california mostly). apple maps is ok for simple use cases like finding a known business, but an ambiguous search on google maps is almost always better, as is their routing.
i'd love to find a better mapping service for these more complicated use cases so i can avoid google altogether.
Where I live but the Southern US Apple Maps is almost as good as Google Maps. Public Transport isn’t quite as good with Apple maps in my city.
[0] Obviously I have no idea if this is the case.
[1] As if they needed any.
Scrolling with shift (!?) doesn't work at all in my FF.
I can't change the search term on the map page...
The satellite view doesn't have street names (????!)
Edit: the link I click is a yelp.com link. Why are we even talking about Apples privacy here and not yelps?
What a horrible step back...
Are you sure you're not in hybrid view?
The behaviour works fine for the MapBox maps.
I also can't drag the map around or click on any items on the map. Really inferior experience so far.
Did you find a way to switch back to the Mapbox maps?
Total usability fail here. Very disappointed in DDG :(
Don’t see why DDG (a search engine) should run an email-service, nor vica-verse really.
That sounds like it violates the nature in which DDG wishes to brand itself. It seems DDG does not want to be the next centralized data platform (this kills their brand of privacy). The one product they already provide - search - is often times not better than Google results. They rather let you choose which search provider you want to use with their bangs system.
> as long as gmail dominates email and business email the privacy argument is largely irrelevant
I know Gsuite exists, but I have personally seen more instances of Office 365 than Gsuite for business in the wild. Not that Microsoft is any more privacy-friendly... just saying that I don't believe Google dominates business email.
There are already alternatives for every Google product, most of them objectively better.
The only thing keeping you locked into Google is you.
If DDG implemented their own set of apps, I wouldn't object -- but it wouldn't be anything that I'd actually use, either.
But there is definitely some edit crowd sourcing, it may just suffer from a smaller or less motivated user base. Speaking of the latter, I've never seen Apple really try to incentivize it either, whereas at least at one point Google had a fairly fleshed out actual gamification for Google Maps where people could sign up to be "Local Guides", earn points for constructive actions, and get badges that could be publicly displayed. Essentially free for Google (dunno if they ever gave anything else to top editors for PR, but they didn't promise it) but even simple public recognition of an icon can be surprisingly motivating for a lot of people. I don't know how active that still is and also vaguely remember stories about editing tools getting shut down a few years back, but at any rate Apple has never really tried anything like that at all AFAIK. Not that as a corporate culture they've ever really gotten gaming, period.
Used that in the past and got a notification when suggestion was accepted & pushed to the map.
I’d guess it’s curated somehow.
What I really hate are mall locations. I wish pin markers put the actual stores in the right portion of the building(s) themselves... hate parking on the wrong side of the complex to find out that I parked on the wrong side. Increase that to when the temperatures are more extreme (under 40F in the north or over 100F in the southwest).
I'm looking forward to the day when people know what they are talking about.I'm not sure this is a fair comparison. Open source is not the same as privacy-friendly.
Apple makes privacy a core-tenet of their product. I do not see the same stance from Mapbox.
Mapkit JS took me by surprise when it came out. But so far, it seems to have been a solid decision, especially at a time when many were looking for new solutions after Google Maps changes finally rolled out. And for the most part it looks pretty good.
(Disclosure: I work for Google but not on Maps, opinions mine and not my employer, etc etc. I wish I didn't have to write this so often.)
- I cannot search?! I can only search on DuckDuckGo, THEN click on the map tab and see a SINGLE location, no similar locations or whatever. And then I cannot in the map tab search? How ridiculous is that? Now I need to do a completely new DuckDuckGo search, hope that it will magically find the street or whatever I search, even if there are multiple ones in the same city. - I cannot look for directions from A to B?! When I click the "Directions" button I get redirected to bing.com, which is currently blocked to a 100%. I don't want to go to bing, I want to get DIRECTIONS, on the DuckDuckGo map tab and not on another website. - I cannot even ZOOM, wtf? I keep using the mouse wheel and nothing happens! This thing is so broken.
And this is only the first visit of the map tab. How they f'ed that up, omg.
Kind of defeats the purpose if I have to use google for half of my searches.
Ddg reportedly does collect some information (?), and their core is closed source.
Personally, I am highly skeptical regarding DDG and find much of their marketing to be hyperbolic (see the duck.com foolishness [0]). For me, I feel that if I'm just going to get Bing search results and Bing ads, I might as well just use Bing.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17595612/google-antitrust...
I started using DDG (slowly trying to remove Google as much out of my daily life as possible) after reading about how Google ATAP tried to patent a MIT researchers life’s work without her knowledge or consent.
We could spend a decade evangelising for DDG, it becomes a significant mainstream player, and then gets sold to someone with totally different priorities. I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong, is there a legal barrier to this scenario playing out?
Lastly, I know the bulk of my searches go through DDG so I don’t have to think about what I searched, on what devices, was it on a public net, was VPN enabled?? etc etc.. What are you thoughts? Do you use DDG?
Not for me, it's not. The quality of Google search results for me has been falling for years now. These days, DDG and Google are about equally good on that score.
I suspect that it's because Google tries to tailor my search results to what it thinks I'm looking for rather than just giving me the results I actually asked for, and it's really, really terrible at it.
Lastly, I love that I can dump random searches from my weird brain into DDG without the feeling that I'm giving some random machine, data that at some point can tell someone what I may want or do or have searched. Everyone knows what you're doing on the toilet, everybody poops, but we still close the door for privacy.
I love Here Maps too, it's good to have alternatives to Google products.
I'd expect DDG to not send my IP address or browser info to yandex. Is that not the case?
I also think the name DuckDuckGo is too long and too cumbersome, they should consider rebranding to something simpler. Branding matters.
I'm not sure Apple wants to get into the mess that offering a major search engine is.
Google is paying them quite well for the opportunity to be the search engine on Apple devices.
When you use Apple Maps to go anywhere, you do have to duck :-)