7,100 employees work on the Google Maps project.

^{Eiffel Tower on iOS 6}

After the release of iOS 6, Apple was seriously criticized for the poor quality of the mapping application. Motorola mocks Apple with the #iLost hashtag, and users are eagerly waiting for Google Maps for iOS to be released, at least in the form of a third-party application, but Google wisely does not hurry .

The quality of Google Maps is much higher than that of the Apple product, for several objective reasons.

First, Apple simply does not have enough resources for this task: the company underestimated the scale of the problem. Objectively, it’s impossible to accomplish the work that Google took seven years to accomplish in a year.
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7,100 people are working on the Google Maps project, including 1,100 full-time developers and 6,000 more contract workers, including Street View drivers, airplane pilots, cartographers, proofreaders, editors, and other support staff. For comparison, Apple employs only 13,000 employees, and of course they cannot all be involved in the Maps project.


According to Mike Dobson of TeleMapics, Apple has made a number of strategic mistakes by selecting third-rate geodata and local business information providers. Dobson believes that Apple will have to take a step back and start developing the project again.

By the way, an interesting article was recently published in the Atlantic publication about the project Ground Truth , Google's secret set of Google Maps quality improvement technologies. For example, one of the modules uses the recognition of road signs on photos taken by Street View cars to refine the road graph and lay routes in the navigator.



Apple and close there is nothing like it, and will never appear, unless they run their own cars through the streets.