prochitecture

Apple Maps 3d is insanely impressive now (see video below) Google on the other hand decided to build an insanely clunky solution to display 3d maps to avoid using mobile GPUs: A Google server streams (!) a live video of its 3d rendered map to you, the result is a disastrous: a super laggy and clunky 3d view full of video compression artefacts with a response time of 2-3 seconds for every movement And I know WHY they built that, someone felt it was not inclusive to only have 3d maps that are high performing on iOS because Apple's GPUs are insanely fast and can deal with it (as you can see below in Apple Maps) but they wanted to support inferior phones, I get it But then they also decided to worsen the experience for iOS users who could easily run 3d natively on its GPU It's just an insane product decision, there's no way to cut it: they could have super smooth 3d like Apple Maps but neutered it with a clunky live stream Even more insane because Google does have native 3d on iOS in a completely different app that nobody uses: Google Earth Is 3d important? Not rly for nav no but it shows again something about Google's engineering decisions, like the redesign of the Google OAuth Login screen that made zero sense Nobody is speaking up against bad ideas in Google meetings, everyone's too scared of HR maybe, it's the opposite of a meritocracy and it's just super visible from using Google products right now