I only talked about bad things related to the application Maps from iOS 6, but there are also good parts of the application, one of them consisting in the fact that we will use up to 80% less internet traffic while doing localizations or searching for various locations. The Maps application in iOS 6 is much more efficient than Google Maps in terms of the internet traffic consumed during use, those from Onavo confirming this thing. Onavo has an application in the App Store that allows you to reduce the data traffic consumed while using the iDevice and if you haven't tried it, I recommend you do it because you will save tens/hundreds of MB every month.
Our data experts performed an identical series of activities on Google Maps and Apple Maps that included searching for several US cities, addresses and airports and zooming in and out to locate specific locations. On Google Maps, the average data loaded from the cellular network for each step was 1.3MB. Apple Maps came in at 271KB – that's approximately 80% less data! On some actions, such as zooming in to see a particular intersection, Apple Maps' efficiency advantage edged close to 7X.
Returning to the good side of iOS 6 Maps, the application from Apple uses vector graphics to display our maps, and this implies the possibility to zoom in/out on locations without downloading additional elements during the process. Google Maps uses raster graphics that require the download of new elements during the zoom in/out process, and this has a very large impact on the data traffic consumed. The efficiency of the Maps application in iOS 6 has nothing to do with the fact that there is less information in it, at least that's what Onavo says.
However, it seems that even in Satellite View, Apple has considered data usage. Our tests found Apple Maps uses only half as much data as Google Maps for the same Satellite searches and views (an average of 930KB for a single page load on Google Maps vs. 428KB for Apple Maps).
In conclusion, the Maps application in iOS 6 will probably be great at some point, but now it is completely useless in Romania.
