FWIW for Berlin, Apple Maps draws the transport lines and stations far better and nicer. Google draws the lines very imprecisely and doesn't show you tram lines, for example.
In my city, Google Maps has NO transit, NO satellite images since 2004, NO map data since 2010. Here maps has satellite and transit, and Apple Maps even has full 3D buildings.
Following is a set of complaints I compiled last year when a Google employee asked me on reddit to post them more detail about my maps complaints.
The usability of any Google product outside the US is a total disaster, and it’s a wonder how Google is able to keep any market share with their quality of service.
NONE of this has been addressed since we started complaining in 2005 (!), except for one thing: that connection between two streets, which is closed with a fence, has been marked as closed. So now we have less people standing there trying to get through.
> The map data on top is from the municipality, the map data on bottom from Google.
> As you see, the street "Beim Bauernhaus" is completely missing, the "Kellerkate" is missing half the street, the connection between "Beim Bauernhaus" and "Kellerkate" is missing, the "Kl. Koppel" is missing parts of the street.
> You currently have data from 2010 for this specific area.
> At least the connection between Steinberg and Nienbrügger Weg is now marked as service path, until recently it was marked as street and people tried to get through there (there’s a fence making that impossible).
> I won’t get too much into satellite data either, because yours is from 2004, too:
> And the unavailability of Public Transit data for busses, etc. on Google Maps – which is available on Here.com – makes it unlikely that I, as a student using public transit all the time – am going to switch back.
"Google started automatically blurring faces and number plates, it was forced to give Germans the option of having their houses blurred out as well – something hundreds of thousands of people took the firm up on.
However, this was a costly business, with Google needing to hire temporary workers to manually blur out selected buildings. It also didn’t stop people trying to sue the U.S. company over alleged privacy infringement. So, in 2011, Google said it was giving up on Street View in Germany – the pre-existing images remain online, but they haven’t been updated in three years."
I know that google uses street view to determine street addresses by OCRing the numbers on the side of houses. Maybe even more of their mapping relies on it?
I visited a dozen+ countries in 4 continents last year - GMaps did a pretty decent (often great) job with public transit. In the cases where there was no/bad data, it usually had more to do with the transit authorities being jackasses than anything in Google's control (Melbourne in particular stuck out as being just terrible).
Well, that doesn't solve the question with the cities where here.com and bing maps have full transit data, and where the data is available via simple REST APIs, but where Google still doesn't have data.
BTW, the Android-App "Öffi" has full support for Melbourne, as Melbourne provides a simple to use API, and has for the past years.
I was involved in a lot of (too many) geo/transit/open data conversations in the late 2000s, and sadly, this kind of short-sighted/nonsensical thinking was all too common, and I'm sure persists in many of the places where people lay the blame on GMaps, when it's actually due to stonewalling bureaucrats.
