All in all, last week’s WWDC was viewed as a success by those in attendance and those of us writing about it from afar. The company released 4,000 new APIs while surprising developers with the introduction of its new programming language Swift. Additionally, the company announced a renewed effort in the cloud while also improving its desktop operating system.
Oh, and there was the highly touted unveil of iOS 8. Missing, however, from iOS 8 was the release of a new Apple Maps program to replaced the much-maligned current version.
Conflicting reports
While one of TechCrunch‘s sources stated that this was due to an exodus of developers that forced others to join the program, a second source blamed project managers incompetence.
“There were multiple improvements that didn’t make it into iOS8,” a source told TechCrunch.
One can assume these “multiple improvements” include the rumored “more reliable” data, a cleaner interface, and the highly anticipated public transit direction feature. That feature would provide something that Google Maps doesn’t despite the overwhelming belief that Google Maps far exceeds anything Apple has done with their own Maps that it began offering a little over two years ago.
“Many developers left the company, no map improvements planned for iOS 8 release were finished in time. Mostly it was failure of project managers and engineering project managers, tasks were very badly planned, developers had to switch multiple times from project to project.” one source told TechCrunch though other sources, as mentioned, find this contentious.
Apple maps from failure to improvement
What’s not contentious is the fact that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Tim Cook was forced to apologize for the disaster that was the first version of Apple Maps. That program also represented the first real failure for the company in the realm of mobile products that transformed Apple.
That’s not to say that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) hasn’t improved its version of Maps and five of the thirteen acquisitions that Apple made public in 2013 were in the location data field including BroadMap, Embark and HopStop.
At the end of the day, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has quite a bit of time to right its ship with regards to Maps before the release of iOS 8 in September.
