Developers Warned Apple Before Launch that Maps Were not Ready for Public - The UpStream

It's that time, again. Time to recap the latest Apple disaster product release, the iPhone 5. Despite the isolated piece of good news, in typical Apple form, the product has been plagued with experience-breaking issues since day one.

• iPhone 5's Purple Flares Found by Apple to be Completely Normal
• iPhone 5 Does Good for Verizon and AT&T
• iPhone 5 Already Comes with Scratches and Dents, is this Acceptable?
• Apple iPhone 5 - The Lamest Thing to Happen to iPhone Since iPhone
• Apple's Tim Cook Issues Public Apology for Apple Maps, Suggests Using Bing Instead

All caught up? Great. It is important to note the last story regarding Tim Cook's apology for the new Apple Maps app, which has been a completely broken app since launch, with improvments finally hitting the software this week. It's also important to note the apology because we are finding out this week that developers may have warned Apple ahead of time that Apple Maps wouldn't be ready for the primetime, but Apple rushed along with it anyway.

Learn more on what developers said to Apple after the break.

CNET is reporting (source link below) that Apple had "plenty of warning" in regards to keeping Maps off the shelf for just a little while longer. Back in June, devs were given a pre-release version to play with and many sent in complaints and reports, filed bug requests and sent emails to direct Apple employees so the company could see the problems that existed within the app. A dev writes to CNET with the following,

I posted at least one doomsayer rant after each (developer) beta, and I wasn't alone. The mood amongst the developers seemed to be that the maps were so shockingly bad that reporting individual problems was futile. What was needed wasn't so much an interface for reporting a single point as incorrect, but for selecting an entire region and saying 'all of this - it's wrong.'

Researching into the Apple developer forums shows that the problems that exist in today's Map app were prevalent well before the final version was available to the public, which leads many to believe Apple simply ignored the issues. Cook did in fact say that if users were to keep using Maps all the time, that the software would get better. Again it feels like Apple is using their customer base as beta testers, fixing problems as they go along. In regards to his own app, another developer wrote,

During the beta period I filed bug reports with Apple's Radar system (notorious for being ignored), posted on the forums several times, and e-mailed multiple people within Apple's MapKit team to voice our concerns.

This has been a frustrating experience for us and we don't care where the imagery comes from, we just would like our customers to be able to have the same experience within our app when they update from iOS 5 to iOS 6. Instead, the OS upgrade broke some of the features we built within our application despite being told that only the imagery would be swapped out.

So what happens now? Apple still says use Bing or Google maps, the exact competitor that it was trying to get away from, until they get their version of navigation software right. As it stands, updates are being pushed out every week or so, to the point where the Statue of Liberty is no longer flat and/or melting. It has created so many problems for one specific developer that over a third of his support tickets are coming in with questions on how to downgrade back to iOS 5. That speaks volumes for a mass of people who usually will just stick it out with what they're given. We'll keep you posted when Apple's Maps are completely fixed - well, at least until they're at Apple's standards of fixed.