Google Maps draws no metro exits in London or Berlin, routes through none in Seoul, and hides the change of line. Naver puts the exit, the transfer and the floor in the directions, the layer AR will need.
Gwangheungchang is a small metro station in Mapo, Seoul, with six exits. Ask Google Maps for a walk from the station to Seogang-dong Community Centre, about 300 metres away, and it finds nothing. Ask Naver Map for a route that starts nearby, and the first step tells you which exit to take.
That walk is barely longer than the station's own platform. It's the moment a visitor stops trusting the app and starts looking for a sign. And the exit Naver names decides which side of a six-lane road you come up on.
It does. Zoom in and Google draws the station under Dongmak-ro and all six exits, numbered, from TMap's data. It looks like a map that knows the station.
The exits are paint. Ask for transit from City Hall and Google names no exit, then asks you to switch to the app. There are no lifts and no escalators on the map. The local layer is drawn, and none of the directions read it.
No. Google does the same at home. Oxford Circus in London gets a roundel and a name at street level, and Alexanderplatz in Berlin gets a row of line badges. Neither shows a single exit. Gwangheungchang has exits on Google only because TMap supplied them. Naver draws its own, with the lifts and the escalator beside them.
City Hall to Gwangheungchang takes one change. Naver's Subway Preview draws the whole trip: Line 2 west to Hapjeong, Line 6 from there, 18 minutes, 5:07 to 5:25 PM. Google says 26 minutes, labels the lines 2호선 and 6호선 in Korean only, never names Hapjeong, and greys out every leg until you switch to the app.
The change of line is where a visitor gets lost, and Naver gives it most of the screen. Google leaves it out.
That one line changes the walk. If the restaurant I'm going to is near exit 1, I take exit 1 instead of exit 5, and I don't have to cross the busy road. Crossing it is more dangerous by default, and it wastes time.
Pick a door on the map below and the exit with the shortest walk lights up. Then pick a different exit and watch the route.
A minute or two doesn't sound like much. It's spent waiting at a crossing on Seogang-ro, on the wrong side of the street, in a city you're still learning.
Indoors the gap gets wider. COEX in Gangnam is one of Asia's largest underground malls. Google labels the Starfield part "Huge underground mall" and then draws none of it. At full zoom it's shop pins on a blank field.
Naver's app shows the inside: the floors, the corridors, which shop sits on which level. Seeing the layout of a complex indoor space is the part that impressed me most, and it's the part Google lacks most.
Google runs one app in more than two hundred countries, and the same habits work in every one of them. When I land somewhere new, that's worth a lot. Naver's depth stops at Korea's border.
Some of the gap isn't Google's choice. Korean law limits exporting detailed map data, and Google has asked for an exception more than once.
Naver has costs of its own. Not everything is in English when English is selected, and the map refreshes whenever you leave the app, which hurts on a travel eSIM or an older phone. A visitor pays for the depth.
Navigation doesn't end at the door. A trip from A to B runs through the station, the exit, the mall and the floor, and a global map that stops outside leaves all of that to signs. AR on glasses and phones will need every one of those spaces mapped in three dimensions, place by place, and the local apps have already started. The next good map gets built from the inside out.