Comments on: Breaking down the Google Maps – Windows Phone issue

By: Man and Van London

Man and Van London — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:15:58 +0000

Yes i agree on the fairness of competition thing seems underhand really

By: Man And Van Hire

Man And Van Hire — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 07:49:46 +0000

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By: tablets android

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By: Google Maps, Windows Phone, and an avoidable mess |

Google Maps, Windows Phone, and an avoidable mess | — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 06:08:29 +0000

[...] was demonstrated in two ways. Tom Verhoeff used the Fiddler proxy server to rewrite the User-Agent of every request made by his phone. He [...]

By: Old Click » Google Maps, Windows Phone, and an avoidable mess

Old Click » Google Maps, Windows Phone, and an avoidable mess — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 02:57:41 +0000

[...] was demonstrated in dual ways. Tom Verhoeff used a Fiddler substitute server to rewrite a User-Agent of each ask done by his phone. He [...]

By: Bill

Bill — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 14:56:23 +0000

…”but it does not show the cursor”.

Don’t cursors usually correlate to mice? Maybe it is just me, but I have never attached a mouse to my phone.

By: Windows Phone users to get their broken Google Maps web experience back – mwhiffens WordPress

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 12:37:00 +0000

[...] the world and moved the mountain that is Google, but even a few admitted Windows fans came to the very same conclusion that it was done because the experience, well, it [...]

By: salmanshah

salmanshah — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 22:40:48 +0000

I can open maps.google.com through User Agent Switch in my LUMIA 800. And it is working fine as Google chrome on PC.

By: Windows Phone users to get their broken Google Maps web experience back « SP1RACY – All things tech & more

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 05:18:30 +0000

[...] the world and moved the mountain that is Google, but even a few admitted Windows fans came to the very same conclusion that it was done because the experience, well, it [...]

By: James

James — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 04:28:54 +0000

This is my take:

1. Mobile view for maps is developed and targeted at webkit because the trident engine has <<1% market share (and even that’s from winmo devices).

2. Mobile view has extremely low priority for development because android and iOS are already covered. It gets very few updates and only receives attention recently because of apple map’s debacle.

3. During the apple maps debacle, maps got a major update so QA tests were run and windows phone failed or preformed very poorly. They probably only had WP7.5 devices as the WP8 launch/device availability is relatively recent. The results get put into a report and sent to the maps mobile team who decide to redirect WP users if they try to access the mobile maps node.

4. Some time later they update the redirect scripts to point at new/changed nodes and apply updates/bugfixes. One of these changes is a n updated user agent parser/interpreter. The effect of this update is to redirect WP users (correctly) to the mobile nodes.

Now, when a WP user visits maps.google.com they are directed to the mobile node instead of the desktop node. The mobile nodes then redirects the user to the home page because it failed the quality check for the mobile view. The desktop view is never served because the request never passes through to the desktop node.