AppleInsider Staff
A hacker claims to have successfully ported the now defunct Google Maps iOS app to Apple's iOS 6, however the workaround is unstable and requires a jailbroken iPhone.
In a tweet on Saturday, Ryan Petrich said that he was able to get the iOS 5.1 version of Google Maps up and running on the recently released iOS 6, which eschewed the search giant's service for a proprietary Apple solution.
Petrich showed off the solution In a corresponding video, however did not divulge the details as to how he was able to port the app over to the new operating system.
From the YouTube description:
Preview of the old Google Maps application from iOS5.1 and earlier running on an iPhone 3G S updated to iOS 6.0Still crashy and cannot be distributed to the public yet, but it mostly works :)
In a round of follow-up tweets, the hacker confirmed a jailbreak is required to make the legacy Google Maps app functional in iOS 6, and while he would like to release a public version, Petrich is not expected to do so anytime soon.
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
Mike Wuerthele
Chip Loder
Amber Neely
33 Comments
What complainers. Use maps.google.com. What is wrong with that? The Apple maps are great. Now all of you idiots just STFU and go home. Sit down to your PC and Galaxy SIII, pretend to have a Mac and iPhone and be disappointed in the new shit.
What complainers. Use maps.google.com. What is wrong with that? The Apple maps are great. Now all of you idiots just STFU and go home. Sit down to your PC and Galaxy SIII, pretend to have a Mac and iPhone and be disappointed in the new shit.
I agree with the first part. maps.google.com works very well in the interim especially for transit directions, however, some people are still upset about Street View being unavailable, although, I am not among that group. I never really used Street View on my iPhone anyway.
I'm almost completely over the removal of Google Maps from iOS, to be honest. I used iOS Maps quite a bit today and it performed well. It did the job. There's so much to like in iOS, that I almost don't miss Google Maps at all.
With all the indignant self-righteous "outrage", I've used Apple maps maybe 100 times so far to find shit, and not once has it let le down. But hey, clearly the product is an "unmitigated disaster" and "complete garbage" because it does not have 100% of the data that Google has, who has been building up their maps for the past 10+ years and crowd-sourcing the data from hundreds of millions of people. People mindlessly attacking Apple's new maps are missing the forest for the trees. Apple will be a maps juggernaut, at the level of Google, within the next year to 18 months. I predict they will release their own maps app for OSX even, and have everything between them synced to the cloud. All Apple would have done if they delayed the launch is further strengthened Google's position with tens of millions of new users, while weakening their own future prospects.
I have been using a free app called streetviewer to utilize google streetview. That, coupled with a maps.google.com shortcut on my home screen, has got me wondering what the hell the big deal is about. Apple maps has worked flawlessly for me thus far. I travel a good bit, so I never rely on one map source regardless.