Developers: We Warned Apple About iOS Maps Quality

To the casual observer it might appear that Apple was caught off guard by just how bad its in-house maps app was. But the company had plenty of warning.

Developers have been complaining about Apple's Maps since shortly after they were given the first pre-release version in early June, CNET has learned. They say they filed bug requests, sent e-mails to specific Apple employees, and vented on message boards only other developers and Apple could see.

"I posted at least one doomsayer rant after each (developer) beta, and I wasn't alone," a developer with three iOS apps in the App Store told CNET. "The mood amongst the developers seemed to be that the maps were so shockingly bad that reporting individual problems was futile. What was needed wasn't so much an interface for reporting a single point as incorrect, but for selecting an entire region and saying 'all of this -- it's wrong.'"...