Here maps has been a strong part of Microsoft’s Windows Phone offering for years, but that’s coming to an end later this month. Here is announcing today that it plans to pull its mapping apps for Windows 10 on March 29th, and
Tom Warrenwill limit the development of the apps for Windows Phone 8 to critical bug fixes. If you own one of the latest Lumia 950 handsets then Here maps will stop working after June 30th. If you’re still on a Windows Phone 8.1 device then Here maps will keep working, unless you upgrade to Windows 10 Mobile once it’s available in the coming weeks.
I love how the article tries to make this news into yet another evidence that Windows Mobile is abandoned and at the same time to discourage people from updating to Windows 10. The fact is Windows Maps, both desktop and mobile, uses the same Here maps data through licensing, so the overall map quality should stay the same. Since I upgraded my laptop and tablet to Windows 10 months ago, I occasionally used the desktop version of Windows Maps and I was pleasantly impressed. The app is fast, the interface modern and fits with the overall look of the OS – something that couldn’t be said about Here, it was terrible on iOS. The transit directions are top-class, comparable to Google’s at least for Bucharest, something I wouldn’t have expected. The best part: only tree days later The Verge publishes another article about updates to Windows 10 Maps addressing some of the missing features – that’s not how software usually gets abandoned.
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