All Things Location

According to eMarketer, 66.8% of all smartphone users will use a navigation or mapping application monthly. Growth will continue to be steady with penetration reaching 67.6 by 2021.

"Google Maps is the No. 4 smartphone app among US smartphone users, coming just after YouTube, Facebook and Google, according to March 2019 figures from Comscore. Nearly 64% of Android and iOS smartphone users utilize the map app," according to the article.

Apple is expected to release an upgraded version of Apple Maps with the iOS 13 release. "Apple's native map app has been perceived as an inferior map tool to Google Maps for years, riddled with bugs and stability issues. Last year, it suffered an outage that rendered its app unusable for hours to millions of people, losing users to Google and Waze during this period."

What's interesting to note is how high the penetration rate is and how mapping apps are more or less expected to work flawlessly, which is not always the case. The unspoken expectation is that the underlying technology of geocoding and geosearch will also continue to improve relying more on accurate addressing and updated points of interest data.

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Joe Francica
PITNEY BOWES SOFTWARE
Boulder CO
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Totally agree about 'unspoken expectation' Joe. I am actually surprised that data continues to be as bad as it is in these apps. You'd think crowd-sourcing data as they do would result in better quality. I use routing at least dozen times a month I'd guess there are errors 10% of the time. It's even more obvious when you ask the app to suggest alternatives of how thin the data is.

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Dave Andrews
Pitney Bowes Inc
Stamford CT
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