By now it is public knowledge that there will be no in-house replacement for routing via public means of transport in iOS 6. Indeed if you hold an iOS 6 phone (that somebody maybe has left in a bar) and you try to plan a route from point A to point B you find that you can drive there quite nicely with turn-by-turn in 3D. You can walk there. Or you can get forwarded to a – currently empty – section that supposedly will show a list of transit apps to take on the routing.
I have some personal experience with that to share which might also underline why this move by Apple is actually the only reasonable one.
Many moons ago there in the internationally renowned city called Vienna (Austria) Google maps introduced public transit planning. It was great, people could navigate through the city with ease. In Austria the public transit system has been more or less privatized, though it is still has very close ties to the government and politics. Public transit inside the bounds of Vienna is owned and operated by “Wiener Linien”, everything outside this territory and the whole rail system is owned and operated by “OEBB”. Those sound like various independent companies but in reality there are lots of political ties between these players.
For a while everybody was happy and Google was provided the data in the necessary format which had been specified as the de facto standard called Google Transit Feed Specification. Wherever in the world the date is made available in this format, you will get public transit routing in Google Maps.
We can only speculate as to the exact course of events, but let me we lay out some facts for you first. A startup based in Vienna launched an extremely crappy app called Qando which often responds with completely useless routes. Not only does it fail to sound cool by omitting a U (“Quando” is italian and means “When?”), it nevertheless triggered a change of mind at “Wiener Linien”. Or was it because OEBB licensed an app from German HaCon which became the official OEBB routing app named SCOTTY mobil, just like the website.
We cannot be certain who was to blame, but either way the data feed towards Google got terminated. The official reason given was that Google does not properly calculate the routes. When users started to complain to Google, this is the answer they got:
Google apologises that Austrian transit data from OeBB is no longer available on Google Maps. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause to commuters, and are working hard to provide this service again in the future. For information on public transportation in Austria, visit http://www.oebb.at/pv/
de/Servicebox/Fahrplanabfrage/ index.jsp
A birdie tweeted into my ear that this was a result of a back-room deal aimed at neutering Google’s power by making Google Maps worthless for navigation in Vienna. And thus two apps became the only sources of routing information in Vienna. So even though Google was “working hard” they did never stand a chance against the secret deal between several monopolistic companies.
Since then (spring 2010) no progress was made. There was an Open Government initiative, but since Wiener Linien and OEBB don’t belong to the government (at least on paper) they can drag their feet as much as they like and still never provide their transit data to any outsider.
So much for the background story.
The truth of the matter is that if private companies are in charge of public transit and they have vested interests in pushing their own (or partner’s) apps then they have little to no incentive in providing GTFS data to Google. One might think that easy availability of routing info via Google maps might increase these transit companies’ income, but at least the two big Austrian transit authorities do not seem to agree.
Now imagine what Apple would do. It is obvious that they want to cut out Google as a middle man and instead would like to make deals with the likes of Tom Tom. Unfortunately there is no global company that Apple could go to for this kind of data. And why should anybody let Apple have more data than Google is getting?
Even worse, nobody knows the extent of the secret deals that were made to keep Google out of certain markets. Those same deals would probably also make it impossible for Apple to get at this data. In a way Apple has to be thankful to Google for testing the waters and uncovering how difficult it is to get worldwide coverage on a voluntary (and free) basis.
Because of this Apple does the only smart thing: let the companies do it themselves. For Austria I am pretty sure that you will end up seeing Qando and SCOTTY on this list of public transit routing providers.
There will most likely be a way for the new Maps to pass on the start and end coordinates to the app you end up choosing and then you will get the routing info from there instead of being integrated in Maps. Or maybe there will be a way to expose the discovered route somehow inside the maps app. But for this to happen Apple needs to provide some sort of communication process between apps, above and beyond URL schemes. So the app context switch is the more likely variant.
By rolling over the responsibility to the local transit companies Apple makes the smart move of forcing the users to talk to their local companies if they want to trigger an acceptable routing experience from within Apple maps. Apple creates a “negative space”, an obvious void that is just begging to be filled by multiple apps competing to be the public transport info provider of choice for the user. At the same time they are creating an incredible business opportunity to either create the official transit apps for certain areas or to create a premium transit app that competes with some crappy incumbent app.
Transit is something very personal, because people tend to use public transport every day to get to and from work. While Google’s answer was to have system from consuming data feeds, Apple’s is much simpler: There’s an App for that!
Categories: Apple
I have looked at doing quite a number of Apps that involve vast amounts of data from other people and they have always been abandoned because of the problem of obtaining that data for free.
Why should a private company give their data to another private company so that the second one can make a profit from it. Each of the two companies now have their own solution from which they are able (but may not do do) make a profit from.
I cannot be sure but I should think Google could have this information from both companies if it was willing to pay for it. It is not willing to pay for it and so cannot have it. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
What i find the interesting part is that public transit information is not freely available. If i have to download and pay for a different app every where I go in the world, I think that is a bit small minded. If I were the Vienna government, I would want to encourage people to come to visit (beautiful city btw) and offer easy and simple ways for people to get around.
I understand that this is a privatized company and they can charge $100 for an app and the people can’t say anything about it but services that are for the public should be made available to the public without a fee. This whole philosophy of hording data is not a good one for the population but is a profitable one for the few who control it.
Kind of like how FB owns all your personal data. It locks you in to using that social network whether it is good or not. I would prefer an open social network profile that adheres to a standard and the information/posts can be shared between all networks. Then you let the social networks compete on features/functionality instead of data that should be made public.
In this mapping situation, it should remain open so that Google and Apple can consume it and then the better mapping solution will rise to the top. Competition breeds innovation and advancement. Monopolies wither and die. We’ve had the IE6 life before and we saw where that got us. Thankfully Firefox came and brought us out of the dark ages and now there is competition again and IE has been forced to step up to remain relevant.
Luckily, in the USA, the Bing app on my iPhone provides the same level of transit guidance as Google.
Yeah… I live in Norman Oklahoma. The CART (Cleveland Area Rapid Transit), our public transit system is not integrated into Google Maps. I have to go to a different website in order to access that information.