Category: Google Maps

Google Maps for Android has had the ability to give you reminders of when you need to leave for your next appointment.  It is a handy feature and it takes into consideration things like traffic conditions to make sure you leave in enough time to make that appointment.  Now that same feature has rolled out to the web version of Google Maps.

With a change of the notification settings when you visit https://www.google.com/maps/ , you will now get a browser notification for when it is time to leave.  The notification works by drawing location information for your appointments from Google Calendar.

After slow rolling out to a few accounts over the past week, the Material Design makeover of Google Maps is now broadly rolling out.  The updated look and feel of the app brings a fresh new look to one of the most widely used apps from Google and also brings it in line with the Material Design makeovers the company has been doing on their apps in general.

The update is a combination of an app update and a cloud side update.  First, make sure you have the latest Google Maps version on your phone.  That is version 9.80.2 and it was released a few days ago.  Chances are you likely have it but double-check.  Assuming you have that version, then it is just a matter of when Google does the cloud-side push to your account to enable the new look.

A new Material Design look is in the process of rolling out for Google Maps on Android devices.  The update is a cloud-side change but you’ll want to make sure that you have the latest version of the app installed on your phone.  For those curious, that’s version 9.79.2.  Since this is a cloud-side update to Google Maps, not everyone is seeing the changes just yet.  It will likely be several days before all accounts get it.

Once you do, the changes will be immediately noticeable.  Gone are the square information blocks and icons on the Explore tab, replaced with bright, rounded corner information boxes and round icons.

Google Maps, one of Google’s apps with over 1 billion users, has been updated to bring nearly four dozen new languages.  The update is a cloud-side change so as long as you are running latest version of the app on your phone, you are good to go.

As for the 39 new languages, here is the full list:  Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Burmese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, Georgian, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Kazakh, Khmer, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Mongolian, Norwegian, Persian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Vietnamese, and Zulu.

After being announced last week followed by a limited roll out, the new location sharing feature of Google Maps has rolled out to the masses.  Users can expect the feature to be enabled in the Google Maps app shortly if it isn’t there already.  You will find the new feature located on the menu of the app.

The feature works cross platform (and on the web) and allows you to share your location or your status on a journey with others that you choose.  That sharing can be limited to a specific time period for sharing while the sharing of your journey will automatically end when you arrive at your destination.  It is more-or-less a return of the old Latitudes product but is more refined.

A few weeks ago, Google announced that they would be rolling out location sharing in Google Maps.  The new feature will allow you to share your location with friends and family for a set period of time and it will work across Android and iOS devices.  As a part of that effort, it appears the company is starting to shut down location sharing within Google+.

Google+ has had the ability to share your location for a long while but if you attempt to use it now, you are greeted with a splash page indicating that the feature is moving to Maps.  The tricky bit is that it hasn’t fully rolled out to Google Maps yet either.