With all of the criticism and complaints Apple has received over its new Maps application in iOS 6, you have to wonder, how did it not know that it had all of these issues? Isn’t that what the three month beta testing period was for?
Well apparently, Apple was aware of the problems. A number of developers have come forward this week saying they submitted several bug reports to the company regarding Maps issues in the months leading up to its launch…
CNET recently spoke with six prominent app developers — each of whom has an app that relies on the default Maps application — who all say that they warned Apple multiple times that its new Maps app was full of bugs.
“I posted at least one doomsayer rant after each (developer) beta, and I wasn’t alone,” a developer with three iOS apps in the App Store told CNET. “The mood amongst the developers seemed to be that the maps were so shockingly bad that reporting individual problems was futile. What was needed wasn’t so much an interface for reporting a single point as incorrect, but for selecting an entire region and saying ‘all of this — it’s wrong.'”
And here’s another developer:
“During the beta period I filed bug reports with Apple’s Radar system (notorious for being ignored), posted on the forums several times, and e-mailed multiple people within Apple’s MapKit team to voice our concerns.”
The big deal here is, these developers were told that only the imagery would change in the switch from Google Maps to Apple’s Maps. But then some of the features in their apps were broken by the iOS 6 update due to the flaws.
To be fair, since its public release, Apple has made some noticeable improvements to Maps. And Tim Cook promises to bring the rest of the app up to snuff as quick as possible. But for some folks, that may not be fast enough.