samuelg123

For the past few weeks, I’ve been part of an experiment group for Google Maps on iOS. The main visible change is that the “X” to close a place view has moved from the search bar to the view itself.

This update has made the app borderline unusable:

- Layers icon disappeared (can’t look at satellite view, etc). Sometimes it reappears but doesn’t trigger any action.

- Selecting places on the map often does not update the place view (tapping on restaurant B after viewing restaurant A, but still showing details about restaurant A)

- Performance is at least 2x worse (on an iPhone 15 Pro). The app becomes totally unusable when the phone is in Low Power Mode.

- Saved pins (eg. Favorites) often do not appear or take a while to appear.

I’ve tried reporting feedback multiple times and haven’t heard a response. This is on the latest version of iOS. Others I’ve talked to do not have this enabled, so I’m guessing this is all fallout from an experiment.

Has anyone else been gated into this?

Still feels like 20% of the time I try to use Siri/Alexa, they hit one of these failure modes:

1. Fail to activate

2. Fail to respond (just keep listening forever)

3. Activate on the wrong device (talking to Siri on Phone, HomePod 2 rooms over responds)

4. Fail to access data they should have ("Who is speaking?" or "I'm having trouble...")

Thinking over it, I think voice assistants have the most bugs of any technology I use daily.

It seems like it isn't possible to know if the source code of an open source app has been tampered with before deployment. Are there safeguards in place against this? Is building from source the only way to be safe?