But Bardin says that Apple has taken a huge bet by partnering with TomTom, a maker of traditional GPS hardware that's morphing into a mapping-data provider.
Both TomTom and Waze are listed in Apple's copyright notice as providers of map data. But Bardin's observations suggest that Apple is relying predominantly on TomTom.
"Apple went out and partnered with the weakest player," Bardin says. "They're now coming out with the lowest, weakest data set and they're competing against Google, which has the highest data set. What's going to happen with the Apple maps, is that you're literally not going to find things. When you do find them, they might be in the wrong place or position geographically. And if you do have it, the route to it may not be the optimal route."
Bardin says that a lot of mobile app developers have reached out to Waze to see if they can integrate Waze directly into their apps, bypassing Apple's.
"They're saying many things that used to work on Google don't work on Apple," Bardin says. "Going forward now, we're going to see this around maps, it's the question of how fast Apple can work with their partners to update the data and how good the user experience will be."
