Rivals Soar After Apple Apology
Competitors to Apple’s new maps app are reporting steep jumps in their popularity after the problems with accuracy that led Apple CEO Tim Cook to write a letter of apology, and even suggest that troubled customers try competing products (see “Hey, Apple: Mapping Takes More Work than You Think”).

Waze, an app that provides maps, turn-by-turn navigation and traffic data based on crowdsourced data served 40 percent more downloads than usual last Friday, the morning that Tim Cook’s letter was published, a spokesperson told Technology Review. Saturday saw 80 percent more people than usual download the app.
MapQuest, a mapping service owned by AOL, was also recommended by Cook. That and Apple’s widely publicized problems with maps accuracy propelled their app up from “between 60 and 80” on the iTunes charts for free apps up to number 19, a company spokesperson said.
Microsoft’s Bing app was also recommended by Cook, but the company said it didn’t have any figures to share related to recent downloads or usage. Neither Nokia nor Google, whose online maps were recommended by Cook, responded to requests for information about recent usage.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.