When it comes to traveling abroad, Apple Maps could use a little direction
Over the past year of international travel I’ve been taking notes on the apps and services I use to get around and how they’ve changed over time. Dan and Jason have done the same. While we—as a species—have come a long way from being completely lost when we’re dropped into a new place, in my estimation we still have a ways to go.
Apple seems less convinced: the only major update to Maps in iOS 18 was the addition of US-only hiking directions. I mean, it also added thick strokes and drop-shadows to its tiny, visually busy icons, so I guess that counts for something. Google is a little ahead of Apple in a few places internationally, but not leaps and bounds. So while you might not get lost while traveling abroad, the experience is certainly rockier than it could be.
Epic rail fail
So you just flug into Zurich and boy are your arms tired. Apple doesn’t offer any proactive help for transit here, which is strange considering how it once, uh, paid homage (cough) to the Swiss Rail clock. The Maps app shows train time tables but no information about how busy the train cars are, or even what platform to use for the train (Google does at least display the platform, so one point for doing the bare minimum). When you plan a route in transit, it doesn’t include how to walk to the train station; it just tells you to walk X number of minutes to the station and shows a dotted line. You can create walking directions to the train station separate from the rest of your journey, but the moment you hit that transit guidance button it forgets what walking is.
I’ve been to other cities where Apple and Google have collected this information, and while they don’t route you through the station they will at least note which exit or platform signs to look for. In Zurich, Apple has markings on the map for “entrances” and “stairs” but they aren’t waypoints for navigation. This is, to say the least, baffling: the Zurich train station is the biggest in Switzerland and one of the busiest in Europe, but to Apple it’s a mostly rectangular shape full of tiny dots.
Those tiny dots are the businesses that exist on the multiple levels of the train station, because it is essentially an underground shopping mall in addition to having underground tracks. While Apple provides maps of many malls and airports with a navigation widget to change levels, they’ve only done that for the busy Zurich airport, not the busy Zurich train station.
Google doesn’t offer any walking directions inside of the train station either. It does, however, offer the layered map of shops that Google and Apple offer for malls and multilevel airports, so you can see which subterranean level track 33 is on, or how many Migros and Coops are inside the train station (more than you’d think!). But it won’t route you to anything. The layered view is also only available at a certain zoom level, so you can’t see the whole station at once in the level-exploring view.
However, Google does offer a “Directory” tab for the train station where you can see all the shops, their hours, and their reviews. So while Google could do a better job here, they’re still ahead of a bunch of overlapping dots on a rectangular blob. But there’s no directory of the train station as a total entity, and no labels for tracks of any kind.
That means even if you use Apple or Google, you’ve got to show up at the station, find a kiosk to buy tickets at, and locate the tracks. All of that adds time you might not have accounted for. Not the end of the world, and certainly better than 15 years ago, but it’s worth noting that there is data out there that these companies are not licensing or collecting themselves. Look at the data site for SBB, the Swiss Railways—it’s bananas.
The real key to the Swiss train system is the SBB Mobile app, which neither Google nor Apple link to. With it you can plan for an upcoming trip in advance, purchase tickets or passes, and get information like what train carriages are first class or second class and which section of the platform to wait at for the relevant car.
Oh yeah, I didn’t mention that little wrinkle, did I? Swiss trains generally have first and second class fares and cabins. The SBB app will tell you how busy they expect various routes to be for each class, as well as the train configuration so you can see how many carriages of each class there are and their arrangement. If you know you have to lug two suitcases—just purely as a hypothetical—and you see that second class is crowded, you might be compelled to splurge on upgrading.
The SBB app also provides walking directions for changing trains, complete with diagrams of the platforms and passages that connect them. Invaluable when you have five minutes or less to drag your bags and your butt up and down various ramps and stairs. Swiss train stations are clearly and consistently labelled, but if all you have is a timetable you’re going to have to do some speed reading of departure boards on the run.
It’s odd that Google (which has an enormous campus next to the Zurich train station) and Apple (which has enormous piles of money) haven’t been able to integrate more train data, or even link people to relevant municipal rail providers. There’s nothing wrong with the SBB app (except the lack of Live Activities and Apple Wallet, and that it doesn’t integrate with non-rail routing) but it took several days before we even understood everything it was capable of; in the meantime, we used those train station kiosks. Neither Google nor Apple direct you to the app in any way, when it would clearly compensate for their deficiencies.
Location location location data
The other big gap when traveling abroad, aside from transit, is location information: specifically, business listings. While I never had an issue with Apple providing bad directions (to street addresses, of course), my experience traveling throughout Europe is that the business listings aren’t very useful.
When you view a spot, you’ll often see a star rating from Trip Advisor or from Foursquare. Yes, that’s right, Foursquare still exists, and Apple features it—sometimes as the only information about a location. But the Foursquare overall star ratings don’t match the reviews next to them, so it’s unclear to me how it is supposed to guide my decision making.
A few years back, Apple added their own review system on top of these third-party partners, but it really doesn’t seem like many people use it. When they do, the business gets a percentage review from the thumbs-up or thumbs-down scoring. You know, just like when Apple Music got rid of stars for likes and then people had likes mixed with star ratings. The perfect system.
For example, there’s a location for a gelateria that has a 75 percent from 8 ratings. That’s higher than the average of places that have no ratings at all, but there are no reviews for context, just a percentage. Does that mean it’s 75 percent as good as the best possible gelato? Or 75 percent better than the nearest competition? There’s no way to know.
Trip Advisor, the predominant review site that Apple leans on abroad, relies on the opinions of other people who also don’t know local stuff, but love to review things. I’ve been to enough highly-rated Trip Advisor tourist traps to know that the rating is mostly useless except as an aid for steering clear of the worst of the worst.
Curiously, some places will feature the percentage rating from Apple, but photos from Foursquare or Trip Advisor, without the respective ratings. All this data is just dumped into Apple Maps without any rhyme or reason.
Even if you really believe in Apple’s data, the functionality holds you back: you can’t, for example, search by what’s “Open Now” like you can in Google (or even in Apple Maps in the U.S. and some other countries); instead, you just get a keyword cloud you can use to filter by the type of food or service.
Google, by comparison, has spent time investing in their reviews, and over the years it has paid off: you’ll find plenty of places with enough reviews that you’ll feel statistically comfortable eating lunch there. Google’s biggest weakness in Switzerland is that they haven’t convinced businesses to claim their listings and take care of managing them. I came across more than a few “Hours May Be Incorrect” warnings. Several times we walked into a place for dinner only to find out that they didn’t open for another 30 minutes, even though both Google and Apple said the place was open.
Lists beat Guides
When we plan our trips my boyfriend typically lists places to visit and restaurant reservations in a Google Sheet. Ever since our trip to Japan last year I’ve started putting the location data into a Google Maps List for each trip. The benefit of the list is that my boyfriend can both see and edit the list. Google also lets you designate an emoji for the list; on this trip we made it the Swiss flag, and each time we looked at Google Maps we could see all the little Swiss flag pins to give us our bearings.
This is helpful for planning, too. At a glance we could see what was around the hotel in the next town, adding dinner options to the list so it was ready to go when we moved on to the next location. We could also add points of interest for activities too, even retroactively for things we ended up doing, as a reference for the future (like you remember everywhere you went on a vacation).
Apple Maps’s closest similar feature is Guides, which I tried to use on our trip to Japan. However, after I entered everything I realized there was no way to let my boyfriend to edit it. All he could do was see it. Absolutely useless for my purposes—I’m not trying to run Time Out magazine for an audience of one.
It’s been a long railroad, getting from there to here
Sure, it’s hard to map every bit of the world, but that’s the task these companies have seemingly set for themselves. According to them, your phone should be your resource for everything, and that in turn sets the expectations for all of us. Things really should be moving faster than they are; Apple only just added Navigo support for Paris in May of 2024 for metro, bus, and rail. Paris! 2024!2
Zurich’s train station has more rail passengers per year than Gare de Lyon in Paris. What does that say for municipalities that are less busy?
Residents that are used to the situation might have given up expecting much—or even trying to use these apps altogether—but it’s certainly something I notice when I travel internationally. You want people to rely on their phones? Give them more information on tickets, train station maps, and better location info. That’s a straightforward route that even Apple and Google should be able to calculate.
- Berner Oberland Bahn (BOB), BLS AG, SBB, and Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn. All can be booked through SBB with up to date timetables, train station transfer maps, services onboard, train formations, everything. In one case we recognized how small the train was compared to the number of people waiting on the platform (the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn segment) and were even able to buy a point-to-point class upgrade before we boarded so that we’d get a seat for the long ride from Visp to Zermatt. That would have been completely impossible if we had to run to a train station kiosk or ticket counter.
- Gee, I wonder what could have prompted that. —Ed. ↩