Gadgetory

hello and welcome to inside scoop I'm Sumi das and joining me is Casey Newton senior writer for seen it Casey thanks for being with us thanks for having me so I got a great gift an early gift for the holidays in my inbox yesterday an announcement from google saying that their app for iOS was now available in the app store was this expected well there were rumors that Google was working on a version of google maps for iphone people said it was going to come before the end of the year we didn't know exactly when and then lately yesterday afternoon we started to hear it's coming tonight it's coming tonight and sure enough around nine p.m. pacific time the app was in the App Store and it was safe to leave the house once again you wouldn't get lost I could rely on your Maps app now there was talk of perhaps Apple throwing up some hurdles and maybe not allowing it in the app store was that just a rumor it was you know that some people are convinced that Apple and Google are such fierce competitors that they would never do anything that would provide any conceivable advantage to the other but you know the fact of the matter is Apple does have guidelines for getting in the App Store which are relatively straightforward right and as long as Google followed those guidelines there was no reason to expect that they would ever be kept out of the App Store and in fact it looks like they were able to get into the app store without too much trouble and already within a few hours Apple is recommending it as an alternative to their much mocked apps or Maps offering which makes sense because when Tim Cook issued that apology that famous apology for the Apple maps app they also he also recommended some alternatives that's right one of the alternatives that he recommended was the mobile web version of google maps which was one more reason why i thought absolutely Apple is going to let it Google Maps app into the store yeah we talked about this before we started rolling but you know we've got this two-party system in in the US and we don't need to have just a one party tech giant it definitely both of ya it benefits all of us when there are many companies working on the same thing we see more innovations more features it really makes things like better for all those yeah the more companies that are giving us options the better okay so let's talk about the app itself I mistakenly was assuming that it would look like the app that I used to know that's right it doesn't know and I think that a lot of people will be surprised when they download the new google maps the maps app that we'd all been using in previous versions of iOS was actually designed by Apple which some people don't know the data was all coming from google apps but it was Apple itself that it designed the way that it looked this gave Google an opportunity a chance to design from the ground up what a Maps app should look like and so the user interface is very spare you open it up you basically see a map and a search bar and you just kind of go from there but an early test I found it pretty intuitive it's nice and clean though I do like that and the voice navigation feature is something that we didn't have in the previous Google Maps version that to apples credit was a feature that i did--like in their version of the maps out yeah they did a really nice version of that was job with that when they when they built their own Maps app the good news for people who want to use google maps again is that Google is now giving away the same free turn-by-turn voice navigation inside the iOS version of their app that they've been doing an Android for a couple of years now okay one minor difference which you mentioned to me which is is that you will not see google maps on the lock screen so if you're but if you've gotten used to driving around town just being able to hit that home button when you're using Apple maps to see roughly where you are with the Google Maps app for iOS you will actually have to open it up open up the phone while you're in traffic and you know minor difference but could cause some headaches a little bit of an inconvenience all right Casey happy mapping to you thanks for being with us for inside scoop I'm Sumi das thanks for watching