With increasing competition from other apps like Instagram and TikTok, when users search for something, Google wants to be the first place people go to find and book entertainment. To help with that, the company today announced three new features for its flagship Google Maps navigation app.
This means more immersive aerial photos and views of 100 points of interest, more detailed bike routes, and better location sharing with friend notifications of arrivals and departures.
Google Maps has long since added more features than the ability to plan how to get from point A to point B, and some of the current features are basically intermediate steps in longer upgrade strategies.
The company first announced the idea of an immersive display at the Google IO Developers Conference in May to create 3D models of points of interest using a combination of street view, satellite and aerial imagery. With that in mind, the company now offers stunning views from over 100 locations in the city: Barcelona, London, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo.
However, while the feature is currently limited to places of interest, the company mentioned in Google IO plans to apply it to restaurants and neighbourhoods as well, allowing users to see what they look like before visiting. Thanks to the company’s efforts to get people to use Google Maps as their location app.
Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s Senior VP for Knowledge & Information, at a conference last month, that Young people are increasingly using Instagram and Tiktok to find restaurants and other locations to visit. Instagram also launched a searchable maps tool earlier this month to help users discover new locations.
However, today’s announcement concerns the details of the cycling route. The company has been providing turn-by-turn bike navigation to its app for over a decade, adding features like elevation profiles and bike rental locations in the process.
Today’s update provides cyclists with more data. It tells cyclists if heavy vehicular traffic is expected and, usefully, if they have access to roads such as main roads, secondary roads, bike lanes, or public lanes. It also notifies users of obstacles such as: B. Steep hills or stairs.
This brings Google Maps closer to how various bike navigation apps work and helps make the app more reliable, especially in lesser known areas or on unpredictable routes.
Last but not least, Google is also enhancing location sharing by adding arrival and departure notifications for a specific location. Location sharing allows you to share your live location for a set period of time through a URL.
Let’s say you’re meeting a group of friends in a restaurant, you can set up location notifications for that restaurant so that you’ll be alerted as soon as your friends who are sharing your location gets there. Google says users can also set up notifications for departure from a location so they can be informed when friends or family leave.
Google says it will send recurring notifications via the Maps app and email if users consistently share location notifications with someone. So, if you want, you can disable this notification in the Location Sharing tab.
All features, including the immersive view, location sharing notifications, and cycling route information, will be accessible to Google Maps users on iOS and Android in the coming weeks in cities that support bike navigation.
