Quote:
Originally Posted by ken0042
When really if you are in a position where the difference between Google and Apple maps would make or break you; then you should be using something other than your phone as a GPS.
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Why? Hardware devices have their data updated less frequently than any online service - Apple and Google (and other online) mapping resources not only use the same base data to build out their initial data set, but you have immediate access to their iterative improvements and updates to their live data set.
Every dedicated GPS sources map data from one of the same basic providers as the phones - NavTeq, TomTom, OSM, Nokia, etc.
You can load TomTom (using their dataset) and Garmin's Navigon (which uses NavTeq) apps on your phone and get the exact same dataset as their dedicated hardware, and you'll discover exactly the same thing - that every map provider has their own peculiarities and incorrect data.
Leaving POI information aside for a few minutes, what most people are dealing with, when we get right down to it, isn't terrible accuracy issues in any of these mapping solutions - it's that they are noticing the errors and exceptions are different between them, especially when most people have only been exposed to one set of GIS data, which is typically Google's.
All that being said, in my opinion Google's data is almost certainly the gold standard for accuracy - it definitely helps that they've driven an awful lot of the roadways they are mapping. And no hardware based solution has access to that data set, that I know of, and certainly not access to the most current version of that data in real time.