Although Tim Cook promised to solve the problems of Apple Maps, for now Apple's map system is not working correctly and mistakes are still being introduced in the names of the streets. Using the Maps application in Kabul, Yaroslav Trofimov, the man who runs the Wall Street Journal in Afghanistan, discovered that some streets in Apple Maps have the names Bad Monkey, Mojo Way, Hillbilly Hameed, etc. Apple seems to have copied the OpenStreetMap maps for Afghanistan in iOS 6 Maps, the respective maps being made with the help of Afghan students.
The issue is that Apple took an old snapshot of the OpenStreetMap data and hasn't updated it since, so things like 'personal' street names are in there, even if they have been fixed since," explained Kate Chapman, Indonesia-based director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, OSM's humanitarian mapping initiative. "The fact that they don't update the data shows that the incentive for people to improve the map just isn't going to be there.
The problem with these maps is that the respective students named the streets using the names most often used by people, or fictitious names, because the official names were disputed by the authorities and subject to change. By copying the old maps from OpenStreetMaps, Apple also imported the mistakes into its system, the engineers skipping the stage of checking them, otherwise they would have discovered that Hillbilly Hammed are not something real, even if we are talking about Afghanistan.
What I think is interesting is that Apple didn't choose to use OSM for other areas," Chapman wrote in her email to me. "Today I write to you from Kupang, [Indonesia] and if you look on Apple Maps there is only a dot for the city name, but in OSM there is a quite detailed map.
Probably similar problems exist in other countries, but even Google Maps is not perfect.
