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Google Maps adds ‘Commute’ tab and music controls
Google just announced new features for Google Maps on Android and iOS. The update is rolling out this week and features a bunch of new features focused on commuting, music and getting more personal data from you.
While Google Maps is particularly useful for road trips and vacation, the app also can be useful for stressful commutes. Google is resurfacing some of those features with a new “Commute” tab.
After setting up your home and work address, the app will help you know what to expect in the morning and the evening. If you drive to work, Google Maps now tells you how long it’s going to take and if there are any alternative routes. It works pretty much like Waze’s ETA screen and tells you if it’s going to be faster or slower in 30 minutes or an hour.
If you take the bus or train to work, Google Maps can help you find out when you should leave. The app takes into account the walk or drive to the station. Those public transit features compete directly with Citymapper and most likely relies on a lot of open data.
Talking about public transit, you’ll be able to see your bus or train on the map, slowly moving closer to you. The app also tells you how long you have to wait. This feature will be available in 80 regions around the world. In Sydney, the app tells you how full the next bus is going to be.
Unfortunately, this update comes with a privacy drawback. Until very recently, you could associate your home and work address with your Google account in Google Maps.
Now, you need to activate “web & app activity,” the infamous all-encompassing privacy destroyer — I used to store my home and work address and I can no longer change those addresses without enabling that. If you activate that setting, Google will collect your search history, your Chrome browsing history, your location, your credit card purchases and more.
And Google nudges you to activate that “feature” all the time. You need to turn on “web & app activity” to use Google Assistant on an Android device for instance. It’s becoming quite clear that Google is monetizing its newest features with your data.
Lame: if you want to save a home or work address in Google Maps, you now have to allow activity tracking throughout Google services. pic.twitter.com/OhFkXsUOmc
— Jonathan Mayer (@jonathanmayer) September 24, 2018
In other news, Google also is adding music controls in Google Maps. You’ll be able to control Spotify, Apple Music and Google Play Music. It looks like the company is taking advantage of taller screens to add a banner near the bottom of the screen with the current song and the ability to skip a song or pause the music.
There will be a new button on the right to open your music app, as well. Spotify users on Android also will be able to browse the Spotify library from Google Maps directly.
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Google launches its group planning feature for Maps
Earlier this year, Google announced its revamped Google Maps, which puts a stronger emphasis on discovery. Some of the features the company announced back then have already launched, including many of the promised discovery and exploration tools, but the one feature that was still missing was group planning. But you won’t have to wait much longer to collaboratively plan your outings with friends in Google Maps because today, these collaboration tools are finally launching.
The basic problem Google is trying to solve here probably feels familiar to everybody who has ever tried to get a group of more than two people to decide on where to go for dinner — or any other outing, really. It usually takes way too many text messages to get everybody to agree.
Now, however, you’ll be able to create a list of places in Google Maps and then share those with your friends. And then, like in any good democracy, your friends can vote on where to go. Group members can also veto places by removing them from the shortlist and add other ones that they’d prefer (nobody said democracy was easy, right?).
Once you have created a list, you can share it just like any other link and your friends will be taken right to Google Maps on mobile or the web to join in the planning fun.
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The new Google Maps with personalized recommendations is now live
At its I/O developer conference last month, Google previewed a major update to Google Maps that promised to bring personalized restaurant recommendations and more to the company’s mapping tool. Today, many of these new features started rolling out to Google Maps users.
The core Google Maps experience for getting directions hasn’t changed, of course, but the app now features a new “Explore” tab that lets you learn more about what’s happening around you, as well as a “For you” tab that provides you with recommendations for restaurants, lists of up and coming venues and the ability to “follow” neighborhoods and get updates when there are new restaurants and cafes that you would probably like. The main difference between the Explore and For you tabs is that the former is all about giving you recommendations for right now, while the latter is more about planning ahead and keeping tabs on an area in the long run.
While most of the other features are rolling out to all users worldwide, the new For you tab and the content in it is only available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and Japan for now. Content in this tab is still a bit limited, too, but Google promises that it’ll ramp up content over the course of this week.
Both of the new tabs feature plenty of new features. There is the “foodie list,” for example, which shows you the hottest new restaurants in an area. And if you feel completist, Google will keep track of which one of these places you’ve been to and which ones you still have to visit. Like before, the Explore tab also features automatically curated lists of good places to go for lunch, with kids or for a romantic dinner. It’s not just about food and coffee (or tea), though; those lists also include other activities, and Google Maps can now also highlight local events.
With this launch, Google is also releasing its new “Your Match” scores, which assigns a numeric rating to each restaurant or bar, depending on your previous choices and ratings. The idea here is that while aggregate ratings are often useful, your individual taste often differs from the masses. With this new score, Google tries to account for this. To improve these recommendations, you can now explicitly tell Maps which cuisines and restaurants you like.
It’s worth noting that there are still some features that Google promised at I/O that are not part of this release. Group planning, for example, which allows you to create a list of potential meet-up spots and lets your friends vote on them, is not part of this release.
The updated Google Maps for iOS and Android is now available in the Play Store and App Store.
If you’d like to read more about Google’s rationale for many of these changes, take a look at our in-depth interview with Sophia Lin, Google’s senior product manager on the Google Maps team, from I/O.
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Maps walking navigation is Google’s most compelling use for AR yet
Google managed to elicit an audible gasp from the crowd at I/O today when it showed off a new augmented feature for Maps. It was a clear standout during a keynote that contained plenty of iterative updates to existing software, and proved a key glimpse into what it will take to move AR from interesting novelty to compelling use case.
Along with the standard array of ARCore-based gaming offerings, the new AR mode for Maps is arguably one of the first truly indispensable real-world applications. As someone who spent the better part of an hour yesterday attempting to navigate the long, unfamiliar blocks of Palo Alto, California by following an arrow on a small blue circle, I can personally vouch for the usefulness of such an application.
It’s still early days — the company admitted that it’s playing around with a few ideas here. But it’s easy to see how offering visual overlays of a real-time image would make it a heck of a lot easier to navigate unfamiliar spaces.
In a sense, it’s a like a real-time version of Street View, combining real-world images with map overlays and location-based positioning. In the demo, a majority of the screen is devoted to the street image captured by the on-board camera. Turn by turn directions and large arrows are overlaid onto the video, while a small half-circle displays a sliver of the map to give you some context of where you are and how long it will take to get where you’re going.
Of course, such a system that’s heavily reliant on visuals wouldn’t make sense in the context of driving, unless, of course, it’s presented in a kind of heads up display. Here, however, it works seamlessly, assuming, of course, you’re willing to look a bit dorky by holding up your phone in front of your face.
There are a lot of moving parts here too, naturally. In order to sync up to a display like this, the map is going to have to get things just right — and anyone who’s ever walked through the city streets on Maps knows how often that can misfire. That’s likely a big part of the reason Google wasn’t really willing to share specifics with regards to timing. For now, we just have to assume this is a sort of proof of concept — along with the fun little fox walking guy the company trotted out that had shades of a certain Johnny Cash-voiced coyote.
But if this is what trying to find my way in a new city looks like, sign me up.
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Google adds a wheelchair-accessible option for transit maps
Google Maps has a pretty solid set of data for taking transit from here to there, but anyone with a physical disability knows it isn’t quite that simple. Some stations may be wheelchair-unfriendly, have out-of-service elevators, that kind of thing. A new update to the service adds an option for you to specify a wheelchair-accessible route — though that’s just a start on what’s really needed.
Transit riders in London, New York, Tokyo, Mexico City, Boston and Sydney will now have the option to select “wheelchair accessible” in their route options in the same way they might opt to have fewer transfers or minimal walking. More are on the way.
No doubt this will make life easier for disabled folks, people with strollers or even anyone lugging around something heavy.
But maps, even Google’s extremely detailed ones, are still extremely short on information critical to anyone with a physical disability. Walking routes that take into account sidewalk condition and grade, curb cuts, pedestrian crossing zones or buttons, wheelchair-accessible entrances to buildings and much more could be better integrated into the world’s most popular mapping platform.
We know it can be done because a handful of students did it on their own for a summer project. AccessMap uses a combination of manually generated and publicly available data to label sidewalks as safe or risky for people who have trouble getting around. It’s limited to Seattle at present (can’t expect undergrads to map the country) but the concept is more than sound.
Here’s hoping Google dedicates a bit more of its considerable resources to improving this aspect of the product. Millions will thank them.
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Google is using Maps to turn every video game into an earth-sized epic
Video games are about to look a lot more like the real world. If you’ve enjoyed the thrill of driving through GTA V and spying out Los Angeles landmarks, then that’s a sentiment you’re probably going to start feeling a lot more often while you play video games.
Google is making its Maps API play nice with video game designers, giving them access to the real world’s geography and geometry, throwing 100 million 3D buildings, landmarks and more into developer’s design repertoires. Game studios will be able to use these maps to serve as the basis of their digital environments with all of the models turned into GameObjects in the Unity game engine that are ready to be tweaked and have new textures applied to them.
In practice, that means developers could easily turn New York City into a medieval metropolis, or switch up some textures and change up everything again into some vast alien world. The gaming flavor of Maps API takes a lot of work away from developers that are building vast empires.
“Building on top of Google Maps’ global infrastructure means faster response times, the ability to scale on demand, and peace of mind knowing that your game will just work,” a company blog post on the topic read.
The update also means quite a lot to game developers stylizing augmented reality games that generally call on local maps to orient users in the game world. With this update, developers using ARCore will be able to take the worlds they’re building and slap them onto local maps, giving users a uniquely customized experience wherever they are.
The company is already working with several game developers to build this into new titles (including Walking Dead: Your World and Jurassic World Alive). They will be showing off more on how this works at GDC in San Francisco next week.
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Mapbox makes another acquisition to bolster its navigation toolkits
Mapbox, the SoftBank-backed developer of mapping applications that competes with Google Maps, TomTom and Here, has acquired the intellectual property and developers behind Mapzen’s Valhalla project in a bid to strengthen its navigation toolkits. Google to add restaurant wait times to Google Search and Maps, followed by grocery stores
Google announced today it will soon roll out a new feature to Google Search, followed by Google Maps, that will show you the estimated wait times for area restaurants. The addition is an expansion on Google’s existing feature which shows businesses’ busy times, but with a tweak that helps diners better decide where and when they want to eat. For over a couple of years now, Google… Read More
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Google is bringing video reviews to Google Maps
We’re still very far away from real-time Google Street View or satellite imagery on Google Maps, but Google is, for the first time, introducing video in parts of its mapping service. Users who are part of the company’s Local Guides program can now shoot 10-second videos right from the Google Maps app (or upload 30-second clips from their camera roll).
While the company quietly… Read More
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Google Maps now makes it easier to find parking
Google announced an update to Google Maps today that will make it easier for its users to find parking when they drive into town.
For a while now, Google Maps users in the U.S. were able to see if parking at their destination was likely going to be difficult or not, thanks to the “parking difficulty” icon on the Google Maps destination card. This feature is now expanding to 25… Read More
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