The high-level picture of Apple maps in iPhone5 doesn’t look good; at least not after this interview

Business Insider happened to get on an exclusive interview with Waze CEO Noam Bardin to get more insight on Apple’s in-house mapping services in iPhone5. Here’s what Bardin said.

Earlier this year during Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) back in June, Apple disclosed their brand new operating system iOS6 and new features it accompanied. One of the valiant actions Apple took was including Apple maps thereby ditching Google. Yes, the motive was to drop Google maps and incorporate theirs.

Apple collaborated with many players in the process including TomTom, Acxiom, CoreLogic Inc, Waze, Yepl and lot of other data sources providers in the market; with TomTom being the pioneer.

Business Insider happened to get on an exclusive interview with Waze CEO Noam Bardin to get more insight on Apple’s in-house mapping services in iOS6. Here’s what Bardin said.

“One of the things that happened between Google and Apple, I believe at least, is that the value Google was getting out of the relationship was disadvantaging Apple to the point of saying, ‘We’re going to make a huge bet’,” Bardin says. “Their bet is that they can, within two years, build a product that will compete with Google’s ten years of experience in both search and maps, and navigation, and all of these different things together.”

This is a very deliberate action taken by Apple based on some analysis. Maps are the most frequently used feature after maps and integrating an in-house app would generate 100% of ad-revenue thereby eliminating the necessity of sharing ad-revenue with Google. However, the action is not perfect; Waze believes.

“Apple went out and partnered with the weakest player,” Bardin says. “They’re now coming out with the lowest, weakest data set and they’re competing against Google, which has the highest data set. What’s going to happen with the Apple maps is that you’re literally not going to find things. When you do find them, they might be in the wrong place or position geographically. And if you do have it, the route to it may not be the optimal route.”

This is one story. On the other hand, developers are reporting compatibility issues and have approached Waze for a direct integration without having the need for integrating with Apple.

“They’re saying many things that used to work on Google don’t work on Apple,” Bardin says. “Going forward now, we’re going to see this around maps, it’s the question of how fast Apple can work with their partners to update the data and how good the user experience will be.“

Source