Google Maps with ‘Offline areas’ has become a necessity these days. Think of any road trip, somewhere far where you have never been and you will automatically want to store that area in your Google Maps app (via offline places) and add desired pitstops.
It won’t be wrong to say that Google Maps has become an integral part of our lives. The users can now even edit maps and insert suggestions in Google Maps. I always keep my ‘Offline areas’ updated even when I have no plans to travel outside the city. Doing this not only gives me peace of mind, but also makes me ready to traverse those unknown areas of my city without asking for directions.
“Once you’ve switched to “Wi-fi only”, the Google Maps app will work completely offline — no Wi-Fi needed! You will still be able to use other apps and the rest of your phone as you normally would. And you might even save on battery life too. If you need to see what the traffic is like or update your offline maps, you can easily switch back to online mode by changing your setting or finding the nearest Wi-Fi,” said Sanket Gupta, Product Manager, Google Maps.
Google Maps supports offline areas for a while now, but the latest update adds support for ‘WiFi only’ mode letting you use it completely offline even when the other apps are connected to the internet via mobile data. This would let you save a lot of mobile data during those long road trips or to places with expensive cellular data.
The ‘WiFi only’ mode would also help save your phone’s battery while offering a seamless offline navigation experience.
Google Maps Becomes Entry-level Smartphones Friendly
Also with this update you would now be able to save offline areas in Google Maps on your entry-level Android smartphones too. While saving offline areas to internal memory has never been an issue for those with mid-range and high-end phones, people with affordable phones (4-8 GB ROM) have had difficulty in storing offline mode in Google Maps.
Entry-level smartphone users what it’s like when they can’t try a new app just because their phone doesn’t have sufficient free storage. Thankfully with this new update, they can now store offline areas in SD card too.
“Now, in addition to saving an area of the maps for offline use later, if you have a device that supports SD cards, you can opt to save your downloaded maps to an external SD card (if your device supports them) and free up storage space for important stuff like your holiday snaps or road trip playlists. Now you’ll never have to choose between snapping more food photos or the ability to navigate offline,” Sanket explained.
Another change that comes with this new update to Google Maps is new options for ride services in various cities across Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Currently Google Maps in India shows ride services only from Uber and Ola. We are expecting that Google will soon add more ride services to Google Maps in India too.