14 DAY TRIAL // After plenty of speculation, Google has finally released an iPhone Maps app, after being booted out of iOS 6. Google Maps was the default maps app for iOS since launch, but Apple decided to build its own at some point. As such, the default maps app in iOS 6, the latest version, is Apple Maps.
Much has been written over this and quality of Apple Maps has been ridiculed over and over again. Most recently, Australian police warned people not to rely on it or they may end up lost in the outback as some poor folks did.
In all likelihood, the Apple-built maps app isn't as bad as everyone made it out to be, but since it was worse than Google Maps and Apple users are not used to things becoming worse in an update, people were upset.
It doesn't help that the new Google Maps app is lauded as a huge improvement over the previous one and over everything else available on the iPhone. It's even better than the Android one by some accounts.
It makes sense though, Google was handed out some very good and very free PR with the Apple Maps move, but it needed to have an answer that would be so clearly superior to what Apple was offering to convince everyone that Google is indeed the only one who can build such a thing.
That's not technically true, of course, Google does have a lot more experience and a lot more data than everyone else, but Google Maps is far from perfect.
Still, it's becoming clear that Google came out ahead out of the whole ordeal and that people will be flocking to the new Google Maps app.
That's not to say no one will be using Apple Maps. And Apple will definitely not let this one go, you can bet that it's working on improving every aspect of their maps app, so the war is most definitely not over.
Another thing that Google did right with this release is offer a Google Maps SDK from the get go. Developers can incorporate Google Maps data and technology into their apps and ditch the built-in Apple Maps in the process.