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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Apple Maps long press on the screen to drop a pin on the map at your home location
Tap on dropped pin
Tap on triple dot … button
Choose: Add to Existing Contact
In Contacts you can confirm the location is now set as Home address on that contact.
You can then ask Siri:
drive me home
drive me to {contact name}
(it might ask you which address, if there are multiple contacts by the same name or multiple addresses set. so you want to make sure neither of those are true)
I just confirmed all this on my iPhone by setting my home address to a dropped pin at a random map location in the middle of nowhere that didn’t have a street name or number.
They do have this. I used to sit next to the team in Paris for a while.
I had tried this. The problem is that when I drop a pin on my house Maps assigns it an address that is incorrect and which, in fact, does not exist and which is in the incorrect format:
382/23 Soi Muban Home Land 2 Nakhon Ratchasima Nakhon Ratchasima 30000 Thailand
(There is no house number 382/23, at least not anywhere near where I live.)
So, I tried added a second “home” address with the correct house number and format.
Now I have two “home” addresses; one with a location on the map and incorrect house address, the other with no map location, but correct address.
have a similar problem, only in japan rather than thailand. my house is in a brand new subdivision. my address is …第7工区24街区6番地 which means number 6, block 24, industrial(?) zone 7. sometime next year, my suburb will be officially incorporated into the city and my address will be simplified to …7-24-6 (or maybe …7丁目 24-6). at that time, apple maps may recognise my address. but for now it has no clue.
google maps also doesn’t recognise my address. so you’re one up on me.
for navigation, i use a nearby known landmark as a stand-in for my home address.
