There are a number of times by the time I was able to get to mark something on Waze I'm really too far past it to mark anything accurately...

I think the reason they do that though is to prevent too many false reports. Because it's fixed to where you are you can't have too many people lying about things.

One thing they could do though is to limit reports to places you had been in the past five minutes, or along the general road you are on going back a few miles.

I guess with Waze being bought by Google it's time to make a better Waze that corrects all the flaws in current Waze.

How is the support library not easy?

It is easy. What it is not is nearly as expansive as iOS6 support libraries, never mind iOS7.

And why can't this be achieved with the support library?

Some of it could but a huge number of changes rest on top of an operating system tuned to make them practical to use from the standpoint of performance and battery life for the phone.

As an application developer, why would you shun the support library that brings new functionality from new versions to older platforms?

Because if the performance sucks and the battery life is horrible due to my application, *I* am the one that gets blamed, not the platform.

Seriously never get a job selling phones.

What an ironic foreshadowing!

itunes is looking a clunky relic, and music playing and purchasing from through the cloud with your favourite application can be done on the cheapest Android without any of that ugly legacy baggage. ... and also on any iPhone. Talk about being someone who doesn't know anything about phones! You haven't needed to use iTunes on a PC for what, six years?

Seems like you could probably get a job at Radio Shack with that level of technical expertise.

On the flip side Google offer a competing service on the Apple phone, the embarrassment

It is pretty embarrassing that Apple is so powerful that Google is forced to write apps that work on the iPhone, eh? It's not like Apple has to write map apps for Android. But Google does for iPhone if they do not want to wither and grow irrelevant.

This is strange ... bullshit.

Edited down the helpful summary of your post and general level of mobile understanding.

Also, the rerouting functionality of google maps is pretty limited

Forgot to comment on this - believe me, Waze has NOTHING to teach Google about routing. As you say they have better information when something happens to trigger a re-route, but Waze has sometimes really bad routing. I would use pretty much any app except Waze for routing (though I do like how Waze displays all known events along the route it has picked).

Google maps has to wait for the traffic to start backing up, and that can occasionally screw you. Waze seems to sometimes be able to warn you before the cars really stack up.

That's because if a Waze user is driving by as an accident happens or just after, they can mark it on the map.

The question is, will people stay after Waze is owned by Google? I used Waze because I didn't want my traffic data fed into Google to correlate with everything else I do.

The problem is, nothing else quite like Waze exists so there are not a lot of options (that I know of).

If people do leave, it will affect the value Waze has... a risky move by Google where all the value is based on a user base that may shift elsewhere (though I 'm sure Waze has some good infrastructure, does Google really need a company to help them with good geolocated infrastructure? I think not).

Why does it matter, as an app developer?

Because each iteration makes a number of things easier, some substantially easier.

You are about to see a huge wave of iOS application updates with iOS7, incorporating lots of advanced system features. As Android updates lag in adoption it becomes harder and harder to maintain parity with iOS versions of applications that are just plain simpler to write and have more powerful features.

Why as an app developer would you exclusively target a version and lock everything else out,

Why as an application developer would not not make use of updated OS features that shaves tens or hundreds of hours of coding time, when you know that 80-90% of the target market will be able to run it?

You are not locking everyone else out. You are helping to provide a reason to move forward.

What was the problem with unloading Symphony on consulting support based upon LibreOffice? Given that this is a business they want to be rid of, I would expect they would not need to bolt proprietary stuff on to it any longer.

Regarding MariaDB support, I think you're correct that they're treating it as a competitor. This wasn't really the case for MySQL. IBM provided a supported version of MySQL.

IBM is most visible around Apache OpenOffice. What they are doing around MySQL v. MariaDB is tacit support through inaction. They didn't turn to supporting MariaDB or another MySQL version when Oracle de-supported MySQL on IBM platforms. They did something similar during Oracle v. Google - they chose just that time to abandon the Harmony project and commit to Oracle's JDK.

Your memory of IBM differs from my own.

I can't say I've had that much to do with them. HP, on the other hand, I could rant about for a while...