I live in Thailand. I have entered my Thai address (which is rather long), on my Contact Card, but Apple Maps can’t parse that address so won’t call it “Home” and can’t navigate there.
On the other hand, HomeKit does know where I live and knows when I arrive or leave.
Google Maps can’t parse my home address either, but at least it lets me set my home address by clicking on a map.
I think I might actually use Apple Maps if I could just get it to know where I live.
Isn’t HomeKit just noticing that you are within communication range of your home wifi network?
Yes. But AFAIK, the coordinates of that router are known to Apple. Why not just let me say, “Hey, this is my home for HomeKit, it’s also my home for Apple Maps.”
Have you tried using the GPS coordinates of your Home (you can get these from eg the Compass app) and then entering these as your Home Address in your Contacts? You can also save this within Maps if you search for these and navigate there. Would be nice if you could use the “what3words” app as a location in Contacts and Maps, though I haven’t looked into that to be honest.
I tried using GPS coordinates as my Home address. That still doesn’t work for me. I tried searching Apple Maps for those coordinates and it found the right spot (my house), but came up with an address different from mine. It came up with 382/24, which doesn’t exist. 382 is a block number which may contain many house, not all of which are on the same street. 24 is the house number within that block. The highest house number for block 382 is 7. No idea where Apple got 24. It just doesn’t exist. Plus, the address format that Apple used is completely different from the format preferred for mail delivery by the Thai Postal Service. You want things like that to be consistent for services like Safari auto-fill for delivery addresses.
And, yes, you can save a place with GPS coordinates as a favorite, but that’s not quite the same as Apple Maps recognizing the special meaning of “Home”.
Maybe someday Apple will get Thailand right.
Maps has a “Refine location” option for Favorite locations. Display Favorites and tap the “i” button:
Then tap “Refine Location on the Map”:
Screenshots are from my iPad.
I understand that, but in my case “Home” doesn’t have any location at all:
Apple Maps doesn’t recognize my physical address and won’t use GPS coordinates. How do I get “Home” to have a location?
Sounds like Apple has a bug here. I would leave feedback and (if you have developer access) file a more formal bug report against the Maps application.
If you’re asking me that question I have no opinion. The only “focus” I use is “Do Not Disturb” which turns on at night. I have no need for any other focus.
Apple seems to be slow on the uptake when it comes to map bugs. A few years back I noticed that a train station near my house was located on the other side of the highway and about a mile from the actual railroad tracks. It took years for them to fix that.
Right now there are a couple of perpendicular streets near my house. Apple has named them both “Soi Mongkon”. One of them is actually named “Liap Nakhon”.
On the other hand, Google is right on top of this and fixes errors within days. Within the last few months I’ve reported a waterfall that was a couple of kilometers away from its actual location and a restaurant with a very wrong name. Both of these were corrected quickly with good feedback from Google.
I’m sure Apple doesn’t own the map data, so they need to propagate bug reports upstream. And the actual owner may or may not be responsive to reports like this.
Similarly for the address-to-coordinates transformation logic. I’m sure Apple doesn’t have people researching how to do this for every country and postal region around the world. They’re probably licensing code from third parties, who are going to have various levels of quality.
But regardless of what’s going on under the covers, we need to deal with it by reporting bugs to Apple. They are the only ones who are able to propagate the bug reports on to the responsible vendor, in order to get the database/algorithm updated.
Privacy is a big selling point for Apple, and Apple does own its mapping data:
The reason Steve Jobs developed Apple Maps was because he was blindsided by Google, who provided iPhone’s original mapping service. One day long ago, and a very long time ago it was, Steve heard the news that Google was just about ready to release voice directions for Android Maps, but not for Apple. They also said that voice directions would never be available to Apple Maps in the future, which would be giving Google’s own products a huge competitive advantage.
This sent Steve into super duper, no holds barred, emergency fighting mode. He dropped the license for Google Maps and switched to Microsoft’s crappy mapping service. He also dumped Google’s search services as the default for Safari. And Steve quickly bought a mapping company, and Tim Cook went into overtime and redeveloped its mapping services, and rushed Apple Maps with spoken directions out the door. Though it was a rocky start, Steve and Tim did make privacy a big differentiator for Apple Maps.
They are in the business of providing maps and directions. They absolutely should have an expert on every region they provide a map for.
In the Mac version of Maps, About Maps gives info about the source of data: “TomTom; OpenStreetMap and other data providers”. There is a link that opens a web page with a long list of data providers.
In “Find My”, most of my devices show up quite a ways down the road, in a neighbor’s yard.
This is because of poor connection to the Global Positioning System (GPS) where you are. At home, my devices are very accurate. At my cabin that is placed in a wood with tall trees, most of the time it looks like I am on a hill over on the other side of the valley.
That’s just the nature of providing maps. Google also has a long list of data providers. No single company or organisation can create all the data needed for global mapping. That doesn’t mean that Apple or Google don’t do a lot with the data to ‘create’ their own mapping data which they control, are responsible for, and absolutely should have local experts monitoring.
For Thailand, Google definitely outshines Apple. For example, Google’s satellite view maps are much more up to date than Apple’s. Below is the construction of a high speed rail not far from my home.
Furthermore, Google’s Street View cars constantly gather data on the ground. They even have Street View of tiny little roads in the middle of nowhere:
I’m not disagreeing that the Google data is more up to date (I believe you!), but from the examples you posted, the Apple one looks like it’s much better image quality.
