As part of the strategic partnership, Rahane has also been roped in as the brand ambassador of the startup OATEY will use the funding to raise awareness, for brand building efforts, and to make key hires Founded in 2021 by Jamadagni and Prashant Chauhan, OATEY sells plant-based dairy alternatives such as oat milk, millet milk and chocolate oat milk through online channels Dairy alternatives startup OATEY on Tuesday (August 1) said it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Indian cricketer Ajinkya Rahane. As part of the strategic partnership, Rahane has also been roped in as the brand ambassador of the startup.  Speaking to Inc42, OATEY cofounder Ankush Jamadagni said that the funding will go towards raising awareness about the plant-based dairy alternatives brand and for brand building efforts. The capital will also be deployed to make key hires, expand into the offline channel and launch new products.  The startup is also looking to raise fresh capital as it eyes further growth, said Jamadagni. The D2C brand is also looking to scale growth by partnering with growth accelerators and institutional accelerators in the plant-based space. “The collaboration between OATEY and Ajinkya Rahane symbolises the perfect match of shared values and a common vision. Together, we aim to create widespread awareness about healthier living, advocate for the adoption of plant-based food options, and inspire individuals to lead sustainable lives,” added Jamadagni. Chiming in, Rahane, in a statement, said, “I am excited to collaborate with a health-conscious brand like OATEY. Their commitment to quality products and inspiring brand values align perfectly with my own principles, and I am confident that our partnership will motivate individuals seeking a healthy lifestyle…” Founded in 2021 by Jamadagni and Prashant Chauhan, OATEY sells plant-based dairy alternatives globally through its website and ecommerce marketplaces. Its offerings include oat milk, millet milk and chocolate oat milk. The D2C brand has grown steadily over the past two quarters, and claims to have logged an average growth rate of 57% month-on-month (MoM) and 30% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ). The startup attributes its growth to changing dietary preferences and growing awareness among masses for sustainable, plant-based milk products.  Overall, the Indian dairy products space has seen the rise of many big names in the past few years as users look for organic and sustainable options. This has led to the emergence of D2C brands such as Country Delight, MoooFarm, Stellaps, among others.  The backing from Rahane comes at a time when the dairy alternatives space is witnessing the growth of new startups and brands. In April this year, a similar startup, Zero Cow Factory, bagged $4 Mn in a seed funding round led by Green Frontier Capital, GVFL and Pi Ventures.

Apple has teamed up with Pixar, Adobe, Autodesk, NVIDIA, and Linux to support and advance Pixar’s 3D Universal Scene Description technology. Pixar Animation Studios developed the Open Universal Scene Description (USD). According to Apple, USD enables easier creation of 3D content using diverse tools. The alliance is aiming to make the 3D ecosystem more standardised by enhancing the capabilities of Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD). This will lead to better interoperability among 3D tools and data, which will allow developers and content creators to describe, compose, and simulate large-scale 3D projects easily. As a result, the alliance hopes to expand the range of 3D-enabled products and services available.OpenUSD is a 3D scene description technology developed by Pixar Animation Studios. It offers high-performance, robust interoperability across various tools, data, and workflows and is already known for its ability to streamline cinematic content production and capture artistic expression. OpenUSD’s power and flexibility make it an ideal platform for new industries and applications. “Universal Scene Description was invented at Pixar and is the technological foundation of our state-of-the-art animation pipeline,” said Steve May, Chief Technology Officer at Pixar and Chairperson of AOUSD. “OpenUSD is based on years of research and application in Pixar filmmaking. We open-sourced the project in 2016, and the influence of OpenUSD now expands beyond film, visual effects, and animation and into other industries that increasingly rely on 3D data for media interchange. With the announcement of AOUSD, we signal the exciting next step: the continued evolution of OpenUSD as a technology and its position as an international standard.”To enable greater compatibility and broader adoption, an alliance will develop written specifications outlining the features of OpenUSD. These specifications will be included by other standards bodies, allowing for integration and implementation. The project will be hosted by the Linux Foundation’s JDF, enabling open, efficient, and effective development of OpenUSD specifications, leading to recognition through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).The alliance also invites a broad range of companies and organisations to join and participate in shaping the future of OpenUSD. AOUSD will provide the primary forum for the collaborative definition of enhancements to the technology by the more significant industry.“OpenUSD will help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences, from artistic creation to content delivery, and produce an ever-widening array of spatial computing applications,” said Mike Rockwell, Apple’s vice president of the Vision Products Group. “Apple has been an active contributor to the development of USD, and it is an essential technology for the groundbreaking visionOS platform, as well as the new Reality Composer Pro developer tool. We look forward to fostering its growth into a broadly adopted standard.”Apple has recently introduced its foray into virtual reality with Vision Pro, along with the launch of a new initiative aimed at producing cinematic 3D content for this realm. Through this initiative, Apple seeks to simplify the process of creating 3D content by providing a range of diverse tools.

HP has announced its Back to College initiative. This campaign will feature exclusive discounts and offers on the company’s latest lineup of laptops and printers. Students will be able to avail of discounts on lineups, including HP Omen, Victus, Pavilion and Envy laptops which come equipped with Intel 13th Gen processors. Additionally, students will also be able to purchase subscriptions for the Adobe Creative Cloud platform at a special price. This campaign, which will run through August 20, will also offer discounts on HP Smart Tank printers. These offers will be available at all HP World Stores, HP authorised offline sellers and HP Online Store. HP “Back to College” campaign: Offers and discountsHP Omen Series (Omen 16, Omen Transcend 16 and Omen 17) 10% cashback up to Rs 10,000 and 15% cashback up to Rs 15,000with leading banks on the purchase of HP’s new Omen laptops Avail HyperX Solocast USB Microphone worth Rs 7,527 at Rs 999 when purchasing an Omen device Warranty extension starts at Rs 499 and no-cost EMI options on any Omen laptop for 3/6/9/12 months Upgrade to the latest Omen laptop and receive benefits up to Rs 10,000 by exchanging any older HP laptop through HP Switch HP Victus 16 5% cashback up to Rs 4,000 with leading banks on the purchase of new Victus laptops Buy a HyperX Solocast USB Microphone worth Rs 7,527 at Rs 2,999 when purchasing Victus laptops HP Switch offers benefits up to Rs 3,000 on exchanging an older HP laptop while purchasing a Victus Warranty extension starts at Rs 499 and no-cost EMI options for 3/6 months on Victus laptops HP Envy x360 15 The newly launched Envy laptops come with multiple cashback offers – 10% cashback up to Rs 10,000 and 15% cashback up to Rs 15,0000 with leading banks HyperX Solocast USB Microphone worth Rs 7,527 will be available for Rs 1,999 when purchasing an Envy laptop Benefits up to Rs 6,000 through HP Switch HP Pavilion 5% cashback up to Rs 4,000 with leading banks on the purchase of new Pavilion laptops Flat Rs 2,500 cashback with select NBFC partners Warranty and HP 500 Bluetooth available at Rs 1,499 HP Switch offers benefits up to Rs 3,000 on exchanging an older HP laptop while purchasing a Pavilion HP 14/15 Upto 5% cashback (maximum cashback of Rs 4,000) with leading banks Flat Rs 1,500 cashback with select NBFC partners Warranty and HP Wireless mouse at Rs 299 Adobe Creative CloudCustomers can avail of the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription worth Rs 20,000 at Rs 2,999 when purchasing Omen, Envy, Spectre, Pavilion Aero, or Pavilion Plus laptops.HP Smart Tank printers Free Fire-Boltt Rocket Smart Watch worth Rs 9,999 through redemption Finance options such as no-cost EMI and low-cost EMI with leading banks are available, with monthly EMI starting at Rs 899 10% cashback; up to Rs 1000 with leading banks on the purchase on select Smart Tank printers 1+1-year warranty offer on select Smart Tank printers Free 1-year Print Learn Center (PLC) subscription worth Rs 899

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Online gamers’ association ‘Indian Gamers United’ have sent an open letter to the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman. The letter bats for a reduction of 28 per cent Goods and Services Tax (GST) on online gaming. The ‘Indian Gamers United’ is said to represent gamers from Tier II and Tier III cities. It claims that the majority of gamers are actually in smaller towns across the country. The letter said that high taxation will push the gamers towards illegal and offshore platforms where no tax is payable, putting them into high risk. It further requested for distinction between games of chance like gambling and games of skill like gaming. The GST Council will meet on August 2 where it is expected to decide on modalities for implementing the 28 per cent GST on online gaming, casino and horse racing.Here’s the letter sent: Government of IndiaRespected Ma’am,We represent online gamers from thousands of small towns across the country. Our voice is not heard as people and governments believe that online gaming is an activity of metro cities and big towns. If there are 400 million gamers in the country, the majority of us are actually from smaller towns across the country.Tirth Mehta, who won India’s first ever medal in esports at the Asian Games in Jakarta, 2018 was not from a metro, but from a town called Bhuj in the Kutch region of Gujarat.Many of us not only play games on mobile as a passion, but also use it to earn money and maybe even livelihood.It was only a few years back, gamers realised that they could convert their hobbies into something that could earn money for us.We play all kinds of games on mobile from casual games like ludo to card games like poker and sports based games like chess. We learnt that recently the government has decided to impose a 28% GST on the total face value.Earlier, 18% GST was cut just on the platform fee. We read from media reports that this could Increase the GST anywhere from 1110% to 1300%. At this rate, it will not be viable for most of us to play at all.Companies have said that they will be forced to shut down. Players would then go to try out illegal foreign platforms that offer betting and gambling. We know that our beloved Pradhan Mantri Modiji believes in the potential of the youth especially in the digital sector. Gaming is an important part of the digital sector and we believe that we gamers can contribute to the country.We earnestly request the government to support the gamers. We fear that we will be unable to afford gaming on legitimate platforms because of high tax. We appeal to the government not to push genuine gamers towards illegal betting platforms.To make our voice heard, some of us in Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra, have gathered in our respective towns to make our voice heard. The group ‘Indian Gamers United’ are the silent and unheard majority of Indian gamers.

Any organization working in the cloud has to manage multiple, complex challenges to security and reliability, while keeping a tight rein on costs. Your brand’s reputation depends on managing these challenges with aplomb, ensuring that you handle threats and failures quickly, transparently, and efficiently. Increasingly, organizations are choosing an open-source service mesh to help avoid downtime—while driving potentially game-changing business benefits, including drastic reductions in cloud spend. Eliminate Downtime The shift to cloud-native technologies has fundamentally changed application development from a world where applications run on hardware and networks completely controlled by the developing organization to a world where that control is traded for lower costs and speed in the development cycle. In turn, this tradeoff requires the organization to embrace new cloud-native patterns, like microservices, Kubernetes, and the use of a service mesh, so that the application still has needed security and resilience. These new patterns allow shifting the security boundary entirely from physical data-center security to application security, including ensuring that all data is encrypted both at rest and in transit. The service mesh plays a critical role in this shift, by adding security, reliability, and observability to the application in a way that minimizes developer involvement. For example, Linkerd, the first open source service mesh to achieve the “graduated” status in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, uses sophisticated techniques such as mutual TLS to safeguard both confidentiality (encryption) and authenticity (identity validation) of both sides of the connection for all traffic within an application. Linkerd does this completely transparently, without the application needing to change. Additionally, the mesh’s observability features can allow the operations staff to see problems on a Friday night before they become an emergency. And its reliability features can prevent needing to call in a developer team to work the weekend—instead, the operations staff can simply configure the mesh for automatic retries, preserving the user experience and leaving the more intense problem hunting for Monday. Realize Cost Savings Service meshes offer direct and secondary cost savings. The mesh can reduce direct cloud costs by allowing organizations to get rid of load balancers in the cloud and reduce some network traffic. In some cases, organizations have been able to eliminate hundreds of paid IP addresses for microservices. In cases where the organization is running clusters spanning multiple availability zones, some service meshes like Linkerd can even further reduce costs by carefully routing traffic (or handling outages) so that traffic stays within a zone, which costs less than traffic between zones. This can bring dramatic reductions in cloud network spend (millions of dollars a year) while still retaining the failure-resistant properties of multi-zone deployments, as in the case of Entain Australia, which 10x’d throughput and saved thousands of dollars a day by deploying Linkerd. Service meshes also offer secondary cost savings resulting from the increased efficiency of developers. By delivering critical platform features like mutual TLS, latency-aware load balancing, retries, success rate instrumentation, transparent traffic shifting, and more, service mesh frees developers of these tasks, allowing them to focus on the business logic that drives the organization. These savings are significant. Critical platform maintenance can be incredibly difficult to get right in a large distributed system, placing undue pressure on application developers. Protect your Reputation Operational continuity—and the availability of online services—leaves organizations with no slack. Users have come to expect instant access at any time of the day. In a distributed system, IT outages that start as partial failures in one area can quickly escalate into major operational disruptions that impact the customer experience. Issues, errors, or delays reflect on the organization or the brand. A service mesh delivers a sophisticated set of distributed system reliability features that can help prevent escalation in the first place, including request-level load balancing, timeouts, retries, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and traffic shifting. Some service meshes even provide powerful features like latency-based load balancing and retry budgets to tamp down on partial failures before they escalate. image credit: Buoyant.io blog Service Mesh for All? What kind of organizations can benefit from service mesh? Use cases suggest that nearly every organization creating cloud apps in Kubernetes could benefit—including small start-ups. Not only does the service mesh provide operational simplicity, but it can also enhance progress for application developers at every stage of an organization’s growth. Some open-source service meshes have a reputation for complexity. Others were designed to be operationally simple yet powerful, allowing organizations to see immediate benefits. Choosing the right mesh, one that provides critical features “out of the box,” frees the engineering team to focus on fundamental applications that power the business, providing a competitive advantage. Compare Notes Uses cases for service mesh come from industry leaders that include Microsoft, Plaid, and Adidas. These companies, all with global users, have realized the business benefits of creating scalable systems with resilient infrastructure that includes automatic retries, circuit breakers to isolate faults, and seamless restore functionality. Service mesh helps them detect where failures are happening with advanced observability and provides Zero Trust security system-wide. Microsoft’s Xbox, a gaming system, uses service mesh to enhance consistency across the platform, allowing multiplayer games in the Xbox Network. Plaid, a global financial services provider, uses service mesh to accelerate their production and implement changes in as little as 30 minutes, an unheard-of speed in the financial world. Adidas, a global athletic brand, uses service mesh for system redundancy, security, and automated prioritization of network traffic. Measure The Impact The business impacts of using service mesh can be seen in an organization’s overall uptime (increased), overall spending in networking and engineering (decreased), and developer/engineer productivity (increased). Other changes are more subtle but still measurable, including employee satisfaction for those in networking or development and positive shifts in the organization’s development philosophy. And, of course, there’s one other important metric: how many problems your customers notice. When customers and users are unaware of issues because service mesh has things covered, your organization is meeting expectations, building trust, and enhancing your reputation.

The impacted employees were from tech, sales, customer success, and HR teams, among others, sources told Inc42 The layoffs were part of a cost-cutting exercise as Increff, which provides inventory management and supply chain solutions through its SaaS platform, is looking to turn profitable Increff cofounder Rajul Jain confirmed the layoffs with Inc42 and said the startup is focusing on turning profitable again Binny Bansal-backed SaaS startup Increff laid off around 60 employees, or 20% of its workforce, last week in a cost-cutting exercise, sources told Inc42. The laid off employees were from tech, sales, customer success, and HR teams, among others. The impacted employees were informed about the layoffs in one-on-one meetings with the higher management and asked to resign on the spot, the sources said. Responding to Inc42’s queries on the development, Increff CEO and cofounder Rajul Jain confirmed the layoffs. As per the sources, adverse macroeconomic conditions and failure to meet the targets for onboarding new clients was behind the decision to layoff employees.  “Increff was not meeting the expectations in terms of onboarding new clients that it had projected earlier. Besides this, the startup even saw some existing clients dropping out,” said a person aware of the development.  Another person aware of the developments at the startup said Increff’s expansion plans for the US and Europe didn’t pan out the way it expected despite spending big on marketing in these regions.  Increff’s sales team in the US was among the biggest casualties in the layoff round.  However, Rajul said that the startup is not halting its expansion plans in the US and Europe. “… our sales will be more partner-led rather than direct,” he said.  It must be noted that Increff, when it raised its Series A round led by TVS Capital last year, said it would utilise the capital to strengthen sales and marketing in international geographies, specifically in the US and Europe.  The layoffs come at a time when the startup is in talks to raise a new funding round. However it hasn’t been able to close the round as it is not getting the desired valuation. “The layoffs were a part of the cost-cutting exercise that Increff is doing to achieve profitability at the earliest. Without attaining profitability, the startup won’t get the valuation that it is seeking,” one of the sources said.  However, Rajul said the startup has not yet “gone to the market” for the next round of funding. On profitability, he said, “We touched profitability a couple of years back. We are now focusing on becoming profitable again.” Increff has also cut down its marketing expenses in its quest to turn profitable, as per the sources Founded in 2016 by Rajul, Anshuman Agarwal and Romil Jain, Increff helps fashion brands and retailers optimise inventory and improve sales velocity through its inventory management and supply chain solutions offered via its SaaS platform. Last year, it raised $12 Mn in a Series A round, which saw participation from Premji Invest, Binny Bansal’s 021 Capital, among others. Earlier, in 2017, it raised around $2 Mn from Sequoia Capital (now Peak XV Partners).  Until last year, Increff boasted  of having clients such as Puma, Adidas, Bata, Levi’s, Pepe, Celio, Gap, Benetton, among others. Its revenue from operations rose over 27% year-on-year to INR 44.4 Cr in FY22, while loss dropped over 37.5% to INR 2.8 Cr.  As per Rajul, the startup clocked a revenue of INR 85 Cr in FY23.  With the job cuts, Increff has become the latest Indian startup to join the long list of startups which have laid off employees over the last one year or so amidst the funding winter. According to Inc42’s layoff tracker, Indian startups have laid off over 28,000 employees since last year. 

“If I want to launch a disinformation campaign, I can fail 99 percent of the time. You fail all the time, but it doesn’t matter,” Farid says. “Every once in a while, the QAnon gets through. Most of your campaigns can fail, but the ones that don’t can wreak havoc.” Farid says we saw during the 2016 election cycle how the recommendation algorithms on platforms like Facebook radicalized people and helped spread disinformation and conspiracy theories. In the lead-up to the 2024 US election, Facebook’s algorithm—itself a form of AI—will likely be recommending some AI-generated posts instead of only pushing content created entirely by human actors. We’ve reached the point where AI will be used to create disinformation that another AI then recommends to you. “We’ve been pretty well tricked by very low-quality content. We are entering a period where we’re going to get higher-quality disinformation and propaganda,” Starbird says. “It’s going to be much easier to produce content that’s tailored for specific audiences than it ever was before. I think we’re just going to have to be aware that that’s here now.” What can be done about this problem? Unfortunately, only so much. Diresta says people need to be made aware of these potential threats and be more careful about what content they engage with. She says you’ll want to check whether your source is a website or social media profile that was created very recently, for example. Farid says AI companies also need to be pressured to implement safeguards so there’s less disinformation being created overall. The Biden administration recently struck a deal with some of the largest AI companies—ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta—that encourages them to create specific guardrails for their AI tools, including external testing of AI tools and watermarking of content created by AI. These AI companies have also created a group focused on developing safety standards for AI tools, and Congress is debating how to regulate AI. Despite such efforts, AI is accelerating faster than it’s being reined in, and Silicon Valley often fails to keep promises to only release safe, tested products. And even if some companies behave responsibly, that doesn’t mean all of the players in this space will act accordingly. “This is the classic story of the last 20 years: Unleash technology, invade everybody’s privacy, wreak havoc, become trillion-dollar-valuation companies, and then say, ‘Well, yeah, some bad stuff happened,’” Farid says. “We’re sort of repeating the same mistakes, but now it’s supercharged because we’re releasing this stuff on the back of mobile devices, social media, and a mess that already exists.”

“Making models more resistant to prompt injection and other adversarial ‘jailbreaking’ measures is an area of active research,” says Michael Sellitto, interim head of policy and societal impacts at Anthropic. “We are experimenting with ways to strengthen base model guardrails to make them more ‘harmless,’ while also investigating additional layers of defense.” ChatGPT and its brethren are built atop large language models, enormously large neural network algorithms geared toward using language that has been fed vast amounts of human text, and which predict the characters that should follow a given input string. These algorithms are very good at making such predictions, which makes them adept at generating output that seems to tap into real intelligence and knowledge. But these language models are also prone to fabricating information, repeating social biases, and producing strange responses as answers prove more difficult to predict. Adversarial attacks exploit the way that machine learning picks up on patterns in data to produce aberrant behaviors. Imperceptible changes to images can, for instance, cause image classifiers to misidentify an object, or make speech recognition systems respond to inaudible messages. Developing such an attack typically involves looking at how a model responds to a given input and then tweaking it until a problematic prompt is discovered. In one well-known experiment, from 2018, researchers added stickers to stop signs to bamboozle a computer vision system similar to the ones used in many vehicle safety systems. There are ways to protect machine learning algorithms from such attacks, by giving the models additional training, but these methods do not eliminate the possibility of further attacks. Armando Solar-Lezama, a professor in MIT’s college of computing, says it makes sense that adversarial attacks exist in language models, given that they affect many other machine learning models. But he says it is “extremely surprising” that an attack developed on a generic open source model should work so well on several different proprietary systems. Solar-Lezama says the issue may be that all large language models are trained on similar corpora of text data, much of it downloaded from the same websites. “I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there’s only so much data out there in the world,” he says. He adds that the main method used to fine-tune models to get them to behave, which involves having human testers provide feedback, may not, in fact, adjust their behavior that much. Solar-Lezama adds that the CMU study highlights the importance of open source models to open study of AI systems and their weaknesses. In May, a powerful language model developed by Meta was leaked, and the model has since been put to many uses by outside researchers. The outputs produced by the CMU researchers are fairly generic and do not seem harmful. But companies are rushing to use large models and chatbots in many ways. Matt Fredrikson, another associate professor at CMU involved with the study, says that a bot capable of taking actions on the web, like booking a flight or communicating with a contact, could perhaps be goaded into doing something harmful in the future with an adversarial attack. To some AI researchers, the attack primarily points to the importance of accepting that language models and chatbots will be misused. “Keeping AI capabilities out of the hands of bad actors is a horse that’s already fled the barn,” says Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University. Narayanan says he hopes that the CMU work will nudge those who work on AI safety to focus less on trying to “align” models themselves and more on trying to protect systems that are likely to come under attack, such as social networks that are likely to experience a rise in AI-generative disinformation. Solar-Lezama of MIT says the work is also a reminder to those who are giddy with the potential of ChatGPT and similar AI programs. “Any decision that is important should not be made by a [language] model on its own,” he says. “In a way, it’s just common sense.”

It was September 2012 and a rather rare thing happened. Companies are known to issue apologies for mistakes they make, products/features that don’t land as well as they expected. CEOs rarely apologise — unless you go by the name of Mark Zuckerberg and run Facebook — unless calamity strikes. In 2012, that calamity was called Apple Maps, which forced Tim Cook to write an open letter apologising to customers. “We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better,” wrote Cook in the letter. Almost 11 years have passed since that moment and that is equivalent to two or three human lifetimes in the tech world. You know what? Cook was right as Apple has done a lot to make Maps better. Granted, it has taken 11 years but painstakingly and gradually Apple Maps is an app that can actually be mentioned in the same breath as the undisputed king of the navigation jungle — Google Maps. A polished experience Apple Maps looks very different and it is a good thing. Such had been the excess baggage that Apple Maps was burdened with that even hardcore iPhone fans don’t open the Maps app. It’s as if the icon had an “abandon hope, all ye’ enter here” signboard hung outside. But over the years the interface of the Apple Maps has become so much better. It is cleaner, and looks neat and polished compared to Google Maps. The dark mode of Apple Maps also looks much better than Google Maps. And it’s not about the look and feel. There are not too many labels on Apple Maps and the streets look much cleaner. There are fewer visual distractions on Apple Maps and that is a big plus as it shows and does what it’s meant to do. Walks the walkOne of the things that Apple Maps does way better than Google Maps is pedestrian directions. On Google Maps, it just is very random and you get a feeling of Looking London, Walking Tokyo. It is a struggle at times to use Google Maps while walking. On Apple Maps, it is much more intuitive and using it for walking in a foreign city, it’s much easier and not too complicated. There was a time when driving navigation was quite bad on Apple Maps. Not anymore. More and more I find that Apple Maps is more accurate in terms of the time it will take to reach a destination. Plus, it doesn’t have that robotic annoying voice that Google Maps has. The Apple Watch experienceIf you use an Apple Watch, then Apple Maps is a true delight. More so with iOS 17. Google Maps does have an app for the Watch but it’s just not that seamless. Apple will, of course, give its own app a better experience. Once you start using Apple Maps on the Watch, there’s zero need to look at your phone even for a second. The haptic feedback is really good anytime a turn is coming up. Earlier Apple Maps just gave directions on the Watch but with iOS 17, you actually can see the streets and buildings. Room for improvementApple Maps needs to do a few things more for it to become a viable alternative to Google Maps. For instance, the traffic or congestion shown on Apple Maps is not as accurate as Google Maps. It also doesn’t tell you how long the congestion is expected to last. There have been times when Apple Maps showed a smooth, clean drive when I encountered heavy traffic on the route. Also, Apple Maps still remains an iPhone-only app. For Apple Maps to actually work in a country like India, it needs to be made available on Android as well. Google Maps works seamlessly both on Android and iOS. Apple needs to open it up and give an almost same experience on Android for it to catch up. Apple has made Maps much better and it is definitely worth a try if you are an iPhone user. Perceptions are hard to break but the one about Apple Maps being bad is just pure, simple ignorance and nothing else.