Yesterday, Australian police warned against the use of iOS 6 Maps due to some travelers being stranded after using Maps for guidance to a city. Maps led them astray and Apple has since repaired the error, but it wasn’t exactly Cupertino’s fault.
The travelers were on their way to Mildura when they ended up in a remote area of the Murray-Sunset National Park. The iOS 6 Maps app listed Mildura as being 45 miles away from its actual location, but apparently Apple got the location data from the official Australian Gazetteer. Oops.
The Register reports:
In this case, the Australian Gazetteer – the authoritative list of 300,000-plus placenames, complete with coordinates – includes two Milduras. One is the “real” town, the other is an entry for “Mildura Rural City”, coordinates -34.79724 141.76108. It’s this second entry that points to the middle of the Murray-Sunset National Park, just near a spot called Rocket Lake.
The image above shows the exact location of the town marked by the red pin, while the real town is marked with a purple pin. Either way, Apple should be looking into these type of things. I’m sure there are plenty of cities that are off a little from their exact geographical location. This isn’t really an excuse for any other bad iOS 6 Maps data.
Source: The Guardian / Register via MacRumors
