Victoria Police: Don’t Use iOS 6 Maps



It’s been official for a while now: iOS 6 Maps suck. Everyone from Tim Cook to my mother knows it, but now it’s getting scary. Victoria Police are advising people not to use iOS 6 Maps due to safety concerns. What are those safety concerns? Oh nothing, really, just people stranded deep inside a remote national park.

The Murray Sunset National Park is located around 70 kilometres from the bustling regional town of Mildura in Victoria, and any reasonable mapping software could surely tell that the two are vastly different. Not Apple Maps.

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In the last few weeks, Mildura Police have been responding to rescue calls from motorists who have become lost in the national park after being sent there by Apple Maps. The software actually thinks Mildura is located in the middle of the park itself.

There’s no water supply in the national park and temperatures can reach almost 50 degrees in the summer sun, police say, making this a very serious issue.

Some of the motorists located by police have been stranded for up to 24 hours without food or water and have walked long distances through dangerous terrain to get phone reception.

Police have done their own tests and found that Apple Maps is in fact routing motorists into the middle of nowhere, and are telling people to ditch their iPhones until Apple fixes it.

This is worse than the time Apple sent people seeking a hospital to some stranger’s house. Here’s hoping it’s fixed soon. [Victoria Police]