Google Maps in Japan is unusable. Many times it directed me which might have been the shortest way but through micro-streets that are really difficult to navigate instead of the more efficient 2-lane.
I’ve noticed that Google Maps has this really strong desire to rat run. It really likes taking tiny roads, and making excessive turns to reduce your transit time by a few seconds or minutes.
Unfortunately it usually ends up being slower, because the tiny road aren't faster, Google just has very low accuracy speed data for then.
Apple Maps on the other hand tends to prefer simpler routes with fewer turns. In London this means Google will take you down a maze of backstreets, which frequently have turn or modal restrictions (specifically put in to prevent Google Maps style navigation) Google doesn’t know about. Whereas Apple Maps tends to stick to main thoroughfares, which are always quicker and much less stressful to use.
For me the classic example is driving from east to west across London. Google maps will insist on taking the wiggliest route that’s entirely 20mph speed limits. Apple Maps will suggest heading out east to a ring road and looping back west to your destination. A longer (slightly slower) route, that about a billion times easier to navigate.
To be fair, Japan has specific digital service offerings in a lot of niches that outdo most of internationally aligned competitors with their eyes closed.
It's just many things piling up. transit.yahoo.co.jp for long and short distance public transport, maps.yahoo.co.jp instead of US map services, tabelog.com for restaurant reviews, navitime for car navigation etc. Note that the desired functionality is often available only in Japanese. If the sites have international/English versions, often you get a lite version at best and a dummy version without much content in the worst case. You can observe that for example already when you research the Narita Express rail service; the JR pages in English always have less detail and info than the JP ones. A good thing about Japan's online services is that a lot of them are not "apps" they're web sites and the apps just containers for the web sites, on Android more often than not anyway, as Japan is iPhone country. So you get the same services from your desktop as on your smartphones, and many service websites still have proper, fully featured mobile web versions, as opposed to many Western online services making their mobile web versions increasingly unusable, pushing apps, like .e.g. reddit. Also JP web is much more pleasant than Anglo web in my opinion; they have stuck with a combination of "tables tables everywhere", hypertext links, and dead-simple HTML markup plus colorful icons/ads/banners in plain image formats from the late 2000s which is very easy to read, e.g. https://www.jreast.co.jp/ltd_exp/guide/#price_area2 Easy to read, easy to use.
Really? Are you aware of any alternative that actually works well?
I've been trying to move to OSM but so far i haven't found any usable alternative that actually gets and has good coverage of Japanese addresses in Kanji/hiragana as well as romaji. Apple Maps is way behind Google here (and I find Apple Maps otherwise quite usable in Europe).
Apart from in-car navigators (with terrible UI, at least the ones I tried so far) I'm not aware of even domestic alternatives that are usable. All my Japanese friends use Google Maps.
It's interesting to hear that. Here in the UK I find GMaps way better than Apple maps in a number of ways. Apple maps has a frustrating habit of sending you to anything but the proper entrance to large venues or places of interest, it's become something of a running joke with my wife who insists on using it when driving.
It goes to show how these companies are much less monolithic than we might sometimes assume.
I assume you’re talking about driving. To me Google Maps has worked well when walking around Tokyo, particularly when finding small, hole in the wall ramen shops off the beaten path. I haven’t used it in the city for driving but it’s worked well when going to rural onsen locations. And I prefer it to the rental car’s built in navigation system (which is almost always a Nissan Note).
There is one time it really screwed up. I like walking along those micro streets, lots of interesting stuff to see in neighborhoods. My wife and I were pushing out baby in a stroller and Google maps route sent us along a path that included a giant steep flight of stairs! It wasn’t a big deal by there was no mention that the rout would be in accessible to people who couldn’t climb stairs.
I found Google Maps worse than Apple Maps in both Japan and South Korea, it's kind of crazy that's the case given that Google has had such a lead. It makes me wonder whether Google is investing much into these products anymore.
How do you make Apple maps work with kanji and romaji addresses at the same time? Half the time I'm driving somewhere, I have to painstakingly translate addresses before the search finds it (and even that's not 100%)
