Yes, that's correct. Out of curiosity, do you live in NYC? The subway is part of the life blood of this city, and not being able to navigate from A -> B using maps is a major loss.

Normal situational example: I'm in a neighborhood, say Fort Greene, and I'm meeting a friend for dinner at a restaurant I've never heard of in the East Village. First, I need to be able to find that restaurant by searching for it in Maps -- this largely doesn't work anymore. I often get results that are totally incorrect.

But say I do find the location, I then need to figure out how to get there from a neighborhood I don't actively live in. Do I take the A train and transfer to the F and walk from the lower east side? Maybe it's faster to walk to the Q and get off at Union Square. Or maybe the manhattan bridge is under construction, and it actually would be faster to take the G to north Brooklyn and transfer to the L. This subway system is so massive that even native New Yorkers get turned around and need directions.

If you don't actively live in NYC I think it might be hard to realize how significant losing transit directions is, not to mention useful location search.

It's a little easier in Chicago due to our more boring grid layout (Lincoln Park? I'll take the Red north and transfer to the Brown. Logan Square? I'll take a westbound bus and get on the Blue), but iOS 6 has still given me exactly the same thought of switching to Android for the transit navigation.

Totally, I was in Chicago for work earlier this summer and Apple Maps was completely useless. Luckily I still remember the transit from when I lived in Chicago a while back, but had I not had that prior knowledge I would have gotten myself lost many times.

Yup, and on top of everything you said, Google maps integrates directions from different transit agencies really well. In Los Angeles, for example, there are often routes on three different systems. All the agencies already have trip planners, but none of them will suggest using a neighboring agency's bus or train, even if it would be more convenient.

That's pretty dysfunctional. In Chicago, Metra, CTA, and Pace are three separate agencies, but they do have a common trip planner. (OK, they all fold up into the RTA, but their fights with each other for funding was pretty amusing. The MTA in NYC is much more sane.)

Yeah I used to live in NYC and if you don't know the subways by heart, you really don't live there or haven't for very long. Not to detract from the fact the app isn't ready yet, but you don't need an app to get where you're going if you can read a placard that's literally at every subway. Anyone with any visual sense and literacy can figure it out.

i might be behind the times, but it was easier to use kickmap if I had subway questions...

Think of it like VHS vs. Betamax. "Everyone" says Betamax was technically superior, but often forget that it debuted with only a ~1 hour recording time, making it completely unsuitable for movie watching. However most users wanted to be able to watch movies. So even though it was only technically inferior in one aspect, that aspect was so important to the majority of users as to make VHS a significantly better system.

The same thing is happening here. A lot of people who live in big cities now depend on their phones for directions, and a lot of them need transit directions in addition to driving directions. A phone that can't do that has greatly diminished value. Not everyone wants a phone as a status symbol: some want it to actually do useful things.

I'm on the fence myself. And yeah, when the most used app is the maps for transit directions it does leave a bad taste to go from something that worked great (most of the time) to something that doesn't work for your needs at all. Am I still able to take phone calls? Sure, as long as I'm not at the office though I blame that more on AT&T and working right near the river walk in San Antonio, but the local bus company has said their maps addon won't be out until October at the earliest, March of 2013 at the latest.

And how many people have switched to Mac due to an inferior product feeling? Sure you can still use the computer but if one of the main purposes of having it doesn't work for your needs, why keep using it?

Given it's getting released 7 days from now (and the version that comes with the GM, released today, is equally terrible), I'm, not sure it's gonna change that much before the release...

(irrelevant fact: Maps is the MOST important app on the iPhone for me - after the browser, of course. I've put my life on its "hands" an infinite number of times...)

I never ever use transit stuff in Maps, but for the average person in a major metro are, they're using their phone for this multiple times a day. This is their lifeblood. By the way, why do we still call them phones?

All the map comparisons so far are between Apple and Android. Anybody has experience using Nokia maps and how that fares against Google or Apple map product?