TOKYO — When Hikarie, Tokyo’s new must-visit shopping destination, opened in April, it was already old news on Mapion’s map application. An elite team at the company, which is based here, had marked the glass tower a year earlier, keeping the service a step ahead in this fast-changing city.

Mapion is one of Japan’s homegrown companies that is benefiting from Apple’s maps debacle, which has left local owners of the new iPhone 5 flummoxed over erroneous place names, long-outdated landmarks and train stations that appear to hover in the middle of the sea.

Those errors have prompted legions of users to flock to other map services, including Mapion, which has seized the day by promoting a map app it says is among the most obsessively checked and updated in Japan.

Downloads of its Mapion iPhone app, introduced in June, have jumped threefold since Apple released an update to its mobile software last week that replaced Google’s maps with its own, said Yasunori Yamagishi, who runs Mapion’s development team.