If you haven't read that Moat essay, it is a detective work of art. Highly recommended.

I just want to second your comment because I can't stress enough how badly I want anyone who hasn't read it yet to read it. The week he published it, I must've shared it with every single person who I felt might even remotely care for it. It's a phenomenal piece.

That's odd, the cert is valid Let's Encrypt expiring Wednesday, September 19, 2018.

Maybe your DNS got hijacked? There's been some connectivity outages in the US this morning.

Note the author worked on Apple Maps for the first few years.

This is an interesting fact that I did not know.

If you compare the article, the main takeaway is that Apple seems to be starting to use some of the improvements that Google has been adding to their map program the last several years.

-Satellite imagery to generate build footprints. -Lots of human intervention -Land based car imagery

Which is both a good and a bad sign. It's good that apple is doing these things, but not encouraging that a year after a blog post highlights some of the more interesting things google is doing, apple starts doing them. Apple maps isn't catching up, they're just barely keeping up with Google maps. And their PR people are doing a big push to brag about it.

TFA clearly states that these changes have been 4 years in the making. You can’t roll stuff like this out a year after reading some article on Hacker News.

i dunno; their “street view” vans are purportedly far more advanced than the google cars, and their privacy features seem pretty damn excellent.

the article mentions being able to create a 3d, textured world and do some pretty interesting localisation (street signs that look like local signs, fonts that match local fonts etc) that shortens the gap between the real world and the map.

id say that from a UX perspective (even if their core data isn’t quite as good, which we really can’t comment on yet) they’re doing a lot of interesting things that google isn’t doing.

that’s not even to mention that they’re doing it all while respecting their users’ privacy... something that google will likely never do any more than obligatory hand waving toward.

it think they’re doing quite a lot better than google maps, but it’s just not data related.

That’s super interesting.

A point that I often see missing is that Niantic (Ingress then Pokemon Go) historically is strongly bound to Google.

The get people’s real world movements for long periods of time, it’s even included in the game mechanics where you see path with consequent flow of people. Coupled with all the user submitted and user validated “places of interest”.

Overall it’s a tremedous amount of data of pretty decent quality.

This article was a beauty. Also, if I remember correctly, it was written by an Apple cartographer.