Apple Maps quickly became the butt of jokes when it debuted in 2012. It overlooked towns and businesses and misplaced famous landmarks. It marked New York's Madison Square Garden as park space.
The service was a rare blunder for a company known for simple, easy-to-use products.
It's a different story three years later.
Apple fixed errors as users submitted them. It quietly bought several mapping companies, mostly for their engineers and other talent. It then added transit directions for several major cities, narrowing a major gap with Google.
Apple Maps is now used more widely than Google Maps on iPhones.
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Its significant investment in fixing Maps underscores how important maps and related services are to tech companies. Location is key to helping phone users find restaurants and shops, discover things to do and just get around. It's also big business, as app makers tap into the core mapping functions of phones to direct people in helpful ways and sometimes offer them bargains based on where they're standing.
The quick turnaround also demonstrates how easily companies like Apple can steer people to their own services. Google Maps and various third-party apps offer many features Apple Maps lacks, yet Apple cleverly turned user inertia to its advantage. Many people use Apple Maps just because it comes with the phone. Even if you've taken the trouble to download a competing app, other iPhone services such as Siri and Mail will invariably take you to Apple Maps.
Apple says its mapping service is now used more than three times as often as its leading competitor on iPhones and iPads, with more than five billion map-related requests each week.
Google still dominates among all US smartphones, though, in part because Apple Maps isn't available on Google's Android system, which is more prevalent than iPhones.
By making Maps a core iPhone feature, Apple made it easier for outside developers to include mapping features in their apps. When you go to Yelp, you can find directions to a business with one tap. When you go to the Starbucks app, you can see all the nearby stores.
Google Maps has also been improving. Last month, Google started letting motorists store mapping data on their phones so they can look up businesses and directions even when mobile phone service is spotty. It's available on Android now and coming to iPhones soon.
Third-party apps, meanwhile, have their own innovations. Waze - now owned by Google - is a popular app for motorists to share traffic information and avoid jams. Moovit is better than both Google and Apple at factoring in temporary service changes in mass transit, while Citymapper offers suggestions on whether to board the front, middle or back of a train.
