A few months ago Australian police have warned iDevice owners not to use iOS 6 Maps to navigate the country because the system has inaccurate information, and now the firefighters I take a similar attitude. The firefighters of the Victoria region say that the system iOS 6 Maps was guilty of displaying inaccurate information about some fires that threatened certain areas of that region, an application that displays warnings to users/allows users to report incidents, indicating the wrong locations for those fires.
The Country Fire Authority in Victoria has blamed Apple for reportedly dangerous deficiencies in the maps on its FireReady bushfire information app for iPhone and iPad. The FireReady app was forced to use Apple Maps, CFA said, but the maps were inaccurate and "Macedon and a number of other Victorian towns are located incorrectly". This makes it very difficult to quickly determine the exact location of fires once alarm calls are being received. Users report that towns are located on their maps at the center of the district rather than on the actual township itself.
The problem is that users reported the existence of fires in their immediate vicinity using that application, but the inaccuracies in the system gave the firefighters wrong coordinates that did not guide them exactly to the place where the fire was located. Although firefighters tried to talk to Apple about the app's problems, the Australian subsidiary was not very helpful, recommending that they report errors directly in the app, which everyone is encouraged to do.
"One of the problems with Apple Maps is that they don't show the names of cities and townships at all times," said Theunissen. "This makes it very difficult to quickly determine the exact location of fires once alarm calls are being received. This creates potentially dangerous situations and delays to activate phone trees if required."
Unfortunately for Apple, Australia was the country where there were the biggest problems, the company even postponing the inclusion of the turn-by-turn navigation system because of the difficulty with which it worked there.
