On Friday morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that he and the company were "extremely sorry" for how the launch of its in-house developed map app for iOS 6 turned out. In his letter, Cook recommended other iOS map apps, including "Bing, MapQuest and Waze."
Neowin contacted Microsoft, the creators of the Bing iOS app, for a response, but a company spokesperson told us that Microsoft would not offer a comment on Cook's letter. However, that isn't the case for the people behind the other two iOS map apps that Cook mentioned in his apology.
The Wall Street Journal contacted its CEO Noam Bardin, who said that Waze currently has 26 million users. Those numbers might be going up; Bardin claims, "We saw about a 20% bump in downloads when iOS 6 came out. Today, it’s just out of control. We’re going to break every download record today. So far, we’re up up about 40% for a regular day."
MapQuest, owed by AOL, has also seen a big jump in iOS users. The New York Times reports that, according to a company spokesperson, downloads of the MapQuest app have seen a "significant increase in downloads" since the launch of the iPhone 5 a week ago, although specific numbers were not revealed. Overall, AOL says that it has seen downloads of MapQuest apps increase 35 percent across all of its supported mobile platforms compared to a year ago.
Source: The Wall Street Journal | Image via Waze
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