The Map That Came Back

At first I thought the Apple Maps outrage was just the internet doing what the internet does—piling on the new thing because piling on is its primary recreational activity. Looks fine, I thought. Probably works well enough. Then I found myself sprinting through Charlottenburg, late for something that actually mattered, watching the app spend thirty seconds loading a white rectangle where the street should have been. I rotated the phone. More white. I swore. It crashed. I ended up outside Cheng’s Import and Export ten blocks from where I needed to be. I got a dragon keychain out of the whole disaster. That was the totality of my gain from that meeting.

The particular cruelty of Apple Maps was that it didn’t just fail—it failed with total confidence, routing people into national parks and off the edges of half-rendered bridges as though it had given the matter serious thought and arrived at its conclusions. Australian police issued an actual public warning. I was not surprised in the slightest.

Google Maps is back on iOS now. A real app, not a browser shortcut pinned to the homescreen as a workaround, not a prayer. I downloaded it immediately and stood in my kitchen rotating through street views of neighborhoods I have no plans to visit, just because I could and it worked. There’s something almost tender about reliable navigation—the city giving itself up honestly, answering when you ask where you are. I want to take it somewhere nice. I want to let it find the place.