BLOOMSBURG, Pa. (AP) — Every time my husband and I drive the 677 miles from New York to my parents’ house in Michigan, we dread the long stretch of Interstate 80 through the hills of rural Pennsylvania. It’s beautiful, but lonely, without a lot of places to stop.
On this trip, with a little help from Google and Apple, I was determined to stay caffeinated and maybe find somewhere else to eat besides McDonald’s and truck stops.
We had two iPhones and two Android phones between us, allowing me to test Google Maps on both the iPhone and Android and Apple’s own mapping app for the iPhone. (There’s no Apple app on Android.) These apps all have turn-by-turn voice navigation and will nag you with new directions if you make a wrong turn or try to go off-course.
I tested out the Google and Apple mapping apps before, but focused on how their walking and public-transportation functions worked in New York City. I wanted to see how they performed for driving and outside of the comfort of a major metropolitan area.
But mainly, I wanted to see how Google Maps fared compared with Apple’s Maps, which kicked Google Maps off the iPhone in September. That meant Google had no mapping app on the iPhone until it released a replacement in December. Google Maps with voice navigation has been on Android phones since 2009. I also wanted to see if the Android and iPhone versions have all the same bells and whistles. (Spoiler alert: They don’t).
We set off from New York with our easily bored 3-year-old daughter strapped in the back seat. I fired up the phones and set courses for my parents’ home in Haslett, Mich. (just outside Lansing, for those too lazy to Google it).
The two versions of Google Maps and the Apple software pretty much gave me the same directions and time estimate — just over 10 hours, though we were planning on 12 with stops.
We usually take a break at a Panera Bread bakery about an hour into Pennsylvania, but our daughter was napping and we weren’t really hungry. So we threw ourselves at the mercy of Google and Apple and hoped that they would find us something in an hour or two.
As we wound through the hills, with my husband driving, I watched the little blue arrows on my phones move across the state and checked out the different features each mapping program offered.
The Android version of Google Maps (pictured at right) has the most toys and the most beautiful graphics. The bars and dry cleaners visible on its street maps of New York get replaced by the names of rivers and small-town roads in the distance.
By comparison, both iPhone apps seem bare bones, which isn’t too surprising as the Android app had a head start of three years. Apple’s fancy 3-D graphics largely melt away when you get out of the city.
The Android version allows me to select “layers” for my map showing such things as traffic and nearby businesses.
The restaurant layer proved very helpful when my daughter started getting cranky and we needed to make an unplanned stop.
The traffic layer, which lights up in red, yellow and green depending on the amount of traffic, also was particularly helpful on the way back to New York. It warned us of a monster backup on the George Washington Bridge and estimated how long that would delay us in case we wanted to take an alternate route. We took our chances with the bridge. While the delay wasn’t quite as bad as we feared it would be, it was definitely helpful to know about it ahead of time.
The iPhone version of Google Maps (pictured below left) doesn’t offer layers at all. And while the Apple software does offer some traffic information, you can’t see it in the form of a layer when you’re in navigation mode as you can with the Android version.
The Android version also allows you to set a final destination and search for places along your route, while Google’s iPhone app doesn’t.
Apple lets me do this by using the Siri voice assistant on my iPhone. By hitting the home button and saying “Starbucks,” I got the closest locations.
That’s what we did a few hours into Pennsylvania when our caffeine withdrawal headaches started to kick in and our daughter was getting antsy.