Apple Maps had 2.5 million corrections in four years

From the first version launched in 2012, Apple Maps has gone through over 2.5 million revisions to reach where it is today. "We've corrected more than 2.5 million customer feedback that we have gotten from customers directly to maps that we have corrected and notified them back that we fixed them," said Eddy Cue, senior vice-president of internet software and services at Apple, during a talkshow with Daring Fireball's John Gruber.

It had a lot of issues and bugs at that point of time and drew severe criticism from users. As a result of the criticism, in 2012, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, had written a letter apologising for the "frustrations" experienced by users.

Apple had acquired mapping companies namely Placebase in July 2009, Poly9 in 2010 and C3 Technologies in 2011, before it released the first version of Apple Maps in September 2012. Both Poly9 and C3 specialised in 3D maps. Apple Maps is said to have used C3 Technology's imagery for the Flyovers in the Apple Map.

Today, after four years of continuous development and resolving millions of issues, Apple Maps is finally on par with Google Maps. Last year, it replaced Google Maps as the default map on iOS and also comes preloaded on every new iPhone.

Research by comScore between July 2013 and July 2015 showed that Apple Maps was used by 20% to 30% of all American smartphone users compared to Google Maps' 40% to 51%.