Now that Apple is in full holiday season vacation mode, here is one last look at some promised ‘coming later this year’ services that didn’t make it (and a last minute one that did).
Apple Maps 2.0 USA The highly detailed Apple Maps 2.0 remake was first announced in mid 2018 with a rollout to be in place for the United States by the end of 2019. The West Coast and Upper East Coast made the cut but half of Mississippi, the rest of the Southeast and most of the Central US are still missing (look for the green). This is not a good sign that Apple can deliver on their promise of providing better map services in Japan before the Tokyo Olympics.
Apple Maps 2.0 details are important progress but don’t fix everything
Apple Pay Ventra The native Chicago Ventra transit card on Apple Pay is a big deal that was announced back in March. It represents the first major native transit card for the USA on Apple Pay. The much smaller Portland transit system HOP card landed safely in Wallet in May, but Ventra is still listed as ‘coming soon.’ The fault is not with Apple but with Cubic Transportation Systems who operate transit fare systems for Ventra, New York OMNY, Transport for London (TfL) Oyster, Sydney Opal, Washington DC Metro, and many more. For all of their supposed system expertise, Cubic was extremely slow rolling out Apple Pay Express Transit on TfL and has yet to deliver a single native transit card on Apple Pay or Google Pay. I hope Cubic does a better job in 2020.
Apple Pay Octopus The Apple Pay Octopus ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ saga of 2019 was strange and ultimately sad. The Apple support side was all ready to roll with iOS 13. Octopus Cards Limited announced Apple Pay support back in July with ‘coming soon’ website artwork that was pulled when the launch was officially delayed on December 19. My take is that OCL parent Hong Kong MTR made, or was forced into, a political decision to limit services, starting with the unexplained service outage of Smart Octopus during the Hong Kong Polytechnic University siege. This is not a popular opinion.
Readers have reported riot damage to MTR infrastructure and suggest this might be a reason for the Apple Pay Octopus delay. I don’t buy it. Hong Kong MTR, or someone higher up, wants to limit services and control movement, not open them up. But this introduces great risk: moving people are moving money. Limit services and the flow of people, and you limit the flow of money. In this scenario Hong Kong doesn’t have a future. More than anything, I hope Hong Kong gets it’s future back in 2020.
Yahoo Japan Maps has the best cartography in Japan in comparison with Apple and Google and remains the local leader. They are the only major map that gets notoriously difficult map places like Shinjuku station just right for road and rail navigation. No fuss, no layer on/off nonsense. And they keep improving things like the latest cartography tweaks. Compare today’s Shinjuku station screenshots at the same zoom level and see for yourself:
Yahoo Japan Maps Shinjuku Station area October 24 2019
Japan App Store reviews are fun to read because the Japanese write wonderfully scathing reviews. Never ‘this sucks’, but a numbing dry, oh so super dry analysis of everything wrong. Every last detail. It’s the ultimate put down kiss off because, while Japanese are endlessly forgiving of honest mistakes, they have zero tolerance for professional ‘I know better than you’ fools who make mistakes.
So they are, rightfully, ripping the CASHLESS iOS/Google Play Rebate Map app for being useless with a parade of one star reviews. Too bad the App Store doesn’t come with a zero review star. I have used the iOS app these past few days and it suffers the same problem of Apple Maps Japan Point of Interest mess: unreliable data, poorly managed, seldom updated.
Case in point, the Cafe Colorado in Ikegami is listed in the CASHLESS map for credit cards only, but the store owner got AirPay just for the CASHLESS program and proudly displays the full range of cashless options next to the register with the CASHLESS 2% rebate logo. He has assured me that all options are good for the rebate.
Cafe Colorado Cashless
The Suica receipt does not show any sign of a rebate
But the receipts do not show any sign of a rebate. This might be normal for a post-transaction rebate via JRE POINT, it might not. It might be a AirPay problem. I called the CASHLESS Rebate program customer support line and was instantly connected to a person with no voice machine option nonsense. The support person was nice and quickly said the map data is not current, the best course of action is asking the store. I called again and talked with another nice support person who basically gave me the same answer. Neither answer was the one I was looking for. A mystery to be solved another day.
A Japanese friend complained about the CASHLESS rebate program so far, “How does the Japanese government expect people to use cashless when it’s serving up so much stupid with it.” Very well put, the once mighty Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) tripped and fell on a stupid stick gouging out their collective brain. Let’s hope they find it and start serving up some common sense. Until then, forget the CASHLESS smartphone map and stick with the ground truth.
UPDATE: According to Japanese media news reports the maps mess is not a METI mistake, many settlement companies input wrong data sets into the maps database and now it has to be sorted out. Hopefully sooner than later.
Tokyo Cashless 2020 is a series covering all things cashless as Japan gears up for the big event. If there is a topic that you’d like covered tweet me @Kanjo
iOS 13 is not a software release. It’s a mission statement of what Apple hopes to achieve by the end of the iOS 13 life cycle. iOS 13 will be peaking out just as the Tokyo Olympics take place between 24 July – 9 August 2020. There will be a huge influx of inbound smartphones using all kinds of apps for transit, navigation and payments. Apple has told Japanese journalists that Apple services will be ready. How will peak iOS 13 Apple Pay, Apple Maps and Siri stack up with the competition? How useful will they really be? Let’s find out, starting with the strongest contender.
Apple Pay Apple has put a tremendous effort into creating a global NFC platform that incorporates all the key NFC technologies (EMV, FeliCa, MIFARE, etc.) into one seamless package sold worldwide. This is still unique and unmatched. Inbound visitors with iPhone have the option of adding Suica to Wallet and instantly gaining all the benefits of using Japan’s famous tap and go transit and making contactless payments nationwide.
Apple Pay with Suica makes iPhone a great transit and payment solution for the Tokyo Olympics and Apple Pay Suica will be the inbound star player for all things transit and payments. iPhone and Apple Watch are so perfectly matched for using contactless payments in Japan during the Olympics that I can only wonder if Apple has been planning for this opportunity all along. Make no mistake, Apple Pay is going for the gold.
In addition to Suica support, merchant support is growing for inbound Apple Pay cards as well
Apple Maps Shinjuku shows station exits in fantasy purple that does not match ground truth yellow station exit signage
Google Maps Shinjuku forces the user to zoom into indoor map mode to show very small station exit signs
Yahoo Japan Maps Shinjuku clearly shows ground truth yellow station exits even zoomed out at street level view
The biggest use case for Apple Maps during the Olympics is transit directions and local walking area navigation in station areas. Apple Maps is still a very ‘America centric’ app in that default map views and the UI are geared for driving, not transit and walking. iOS Google Maps has a more intelligent approach that layers transit over the current map view that eliminates the transit view/map view UI toggling of the chunky Apple Maps UI. Google Maps is a much more smoothly integrated collection of services.
Even with the addition of better map detail of Apple Maps 2.0 and Look Around however, Apple Maps must absolutely clean up and completely revamp its cluttered cartography and Point of Interest (POI) layers and remove the bolted on transit functions with improved integration to be a serious contender in the Tokyo Olympics Navigation contest. I don’t see that happening: there’s no way 7 years of bad habits and ‘Where’s Wally’ can be magically fixed in the 10 month run up to the Olympics.
Siri Bringing up the rear, Siri is the ‘Cool Runnings’ contender in the wrong Olympics. With Google Maps you can ask Google Assistant “when’s the next train to Shinjuku” and Google Maps will give you a list of transit options. Google Maps Transit also gives you platform guidance, optimum car positions for the destination station, and ground truth yellow exit numbers:
Google Maps Assistant offers transit information like ‘when’s the next train to Shinjuku’
Google Maps Transit provides platform guidance, car positions, crowd conditions and more
Siri and Apple Maps offer none of this. In fact Siri is not even programmed at this point to provide transit information and politely declines all such requests (and when did Japanese Siri’s speaking rate speed become so SLOOOOOW?). Even a manual Apple Maps Transit search does not provide the same level of Google Transit information: no platform guidance, no car positions, no crowd conditions, etc. Meanwhile JR East just announced an agreement with Google to offer Google Assistant Shinkansen transit information. This isn’t even a contest.
Siri declines all transit requests regardless of language setting
Manual Apple Maps Japan Transit is OK for train times but does not offer platform guidance, car positions, crowd information, etc.
JR East teams up with Google Assistant to provide Shinkansen transit information.
Quick Summary and Tokyo Olympics iPhone Guidance Given the current state of Apple Pay, Apple Maps and Siri, I offer the following suggestions.
For iPhone 8/Apple Watch Series 3 and later inbound visitors from countries with Apple Pay availability:
Use Google Maps and Google Assistant for navigation and transit
For iPhone 8/Apple Watch Series 3 and later inbound visitors from countries without Apple Pay availability:
Purchase a regular plastic Suica card from a JR East station kiosk and transfer it to your iPhone (Welcome Suica cards cannot be transferred), you cannot recharge it with a credit card but Apple Pay Suica can recharged with cash at any convenience store checkout register, any 7 Eleven ATM, or JR station smart kiosk. The advantage of Apple Pay Suica over plastic Suica is that you always know what the balance is and when it needs recharging. You can avoid long queues at station recharge kiosks.
Use Google Maps and Google Assistant for navigation and transit
Traffic has been missing in Apple Maps Japan all this time and driving in Tokyo without knowing traffic conditions is…. well let’s just say that it is unimaginable in a country where car navigation systems with real time traffic conditions are ubiquitous. Apple Maps Japan was pretty much useless for driving, so everybody uses Google Maps and Yahoo Japan Maps which have offered real time traffic for years.
This has finally changed with the iOS 13 release. It was a long wait but at least Traffic for Apple Maps in Japan is here and a viable car navigation option for iOS users. There are lots of missing pieces like Junction View for elevated expressways, and the dysfunctional, obsolete Maps UI forces users to toggle between Map View which has Traffic, and Transit View that does not, it remains a major irritant and mismatch for Japanese user needs. Did it every occur to the Apple Maps team that bus riders want to know what traffic conditions are so they can catch the desired train time at a transfer point? It seems not.
iOS Apple Maps Japan Traffic
iOS Apple Maps Japan Traffic
iOS Apple Maps Japan Traffic in route search
In other Japan digital map news, Google Maps has finally followed the Yahoo Japan Maps cartography lead by incorporating standard station yellow signage for exits. Things in the map finally match what you see on the ground. Yahoo Japan Maps still does it better, especially in challenging locations like Shinjuku station, but it’s a welcome start.
Unfortunately Apple Maps Japan sticks with their stupid purple exit signage that you NEVER find in real life. Let’s hope Apple fixes that, and lots more, before the Tokyo Olympics.
