Google Maps has become an eyesore. 5 examples of how the app has lost its way

Why won’t you show me the street name

This is by far my greatest frustration with it.

Another is that no matter how far I zoom in, it still remains on the smallest font.

I'll be out cycling and it's a PITA to have to dig out my glasses just to read a pissy small street name to know where tf I am!
I'm confused and didn't understand this point.

Both of the screenshots used in the article show the street names.

Every street is shown on the zoomed in screenshot, and every major street is shown on the zoomed out screenshot.
- In my experience, street names, especially on major roads, often don't appear until you zoom right in - usually to the point of the road width basically filling the screen.

in general i'm baffled by most UX changes google pushes to their products. it just makes no sense to me, even if we're being generous with a profits-first perspective

you like that super convenient 1-click "remove" button on your youtube "watch later" list? let's make that a 2-click action by putting it under a dot menu with no other options in there

And lets give the dot menu a slight delay so it looks neat.
I think it's change for the sake of change. The same reason why grocery stores redo their layout every couple of years. They want to make things appear 'new' while also keeping you on your toes in the hopes that you'll buy more product.

They've been doing this for years now with Android. The biggest changes are always with icons and menu layouts now that they ran out of innovative ideas.
- Grocery stores are actually a bit more sinister than that, they reorganize things periodically so people have to spend more time walking around the store and can impulse buy more. They are getting wiser though, they tend to do it more sectionally rather than the whole store so people don't get as fed up.

I use Organic Maps as much as possible. For public transport I use another app (not google maps but a local app for my country). Sometimes I check google maps if I can't find a place or if the opening times are missing on openstreetmap (the source for organic maps).

The main issue with organic maps (and I think any map app based on OSM data) is search. Especially in places where multiple languages are used I've found it quite frustrating.

Valencia, for example, has Valencian/Catalan as its main language on OSM, but Spanish is very common. If I search in Spanish I don't get good results. A small typo will also mess things up. That's pretty frustrating and means I often have to go to the website of wherever I'm going to get the proper name in Valenciano without typos, or I have to look it up on google maps.

Organic Maps is great!
The great thing about OSM is anyone can fix things like this - name tags can have multiple languages!
- Yes that's indeed great and I have contributed to OSM, but even for places with tags in multiple languages the search still didn't work great.
  
  Perhaps it's been improved, but I think Organic Maps first searches for the primary name tag first and only later name:es or name:ca. But that means that when searching in Spanish in Valencia (where the name tags are in Valencian/Catalan), it would often give me results outside of Valencia but that would have the name of what I was looking for.
  
  That's not impossible to improve, but it's difficult to get those things consistently right. Google knows so much about its users it can make really accurate predictions about which results are most relevant.
  
  But what's for me way more significant is that OSM is quite unforgiving when it comes to typos or slightly inaccurate spelling. Organic Maps has that problem and openstreetmap.org as well. As an example: there is a part of the city called l'Eixample. If you search for l'Eixample on OSM you will find it no problem: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=l'Eixapmle
  
  But if you forget the apostrophe, lEixample, or if you switch around the m and p, l'Eixapmle, you get no results: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=lEixample
  
  For me that is really frustrating when I'm outside somewhere and have to quickly look up some place on my phone. Most of the time I can still find it with organic maps, but it can definitely be more cumbersome than with google maps.
Organic maps is amazing. I tend to use MAPS.ME for general commute and also it has a great offline feature to download maps when I'm in a different country. definitely a better alternative to Google maps
- May I ask why you use maps.me? As far as I know that's just a worse version than Organic Maps at this point.

It's a steaming pile of garbage. When I click "maps" I'm expecting a map to open up. With google maps I'm faced with all kinds of menus and shit I never asked for that I need to start clicking away to uncover the map underneath.

Every single one of their apps just screams "consumption" and that's it. Gas, coffee, restaurant, hotels, groceries. These things are all great when I'm traveling but should be 1 menu deep not splattered across the first screen. It's just clutter and it's unattractive.

I'm shocked the auto zoom function isn't mentioned. I am zoomed into the area where I am. I search for something. The app zooms out to show me results from places literal hours away.. Sometimes on different continents. I'm annoyed, I zoom back in to where I was, click on a result, and it zooms out AGAIN. WTF?

I haven't experienced that particular issue, but it sounds very frustrating. Have you put in a big report with them? It sounds like something unintentional that they can correct

Unless there is another app that will give me directions to multiple locations and either allow me to arrange those addresses or automatically arrange the addresses in the shortest distance to drive, I'll be sticking to Google Maps unfortunately. It has its limitations, but I honestly don't know of another app that can do this.

OsmAnd will do that. If you edit the destinations you can manually specify their order. Click sort there and choose door-to-door to get the most efficient routing.

The app takes some getting used to, but it works very well, and can act as a front-end for contributing to OpenStreetsMap.
- I'm trying it now, but it can't seem to find some common addresses that I visit. I'll attempt to use it, but so far it doesn't look promising.
Waze
- Google bought Waze years ago.

Too many ads and bad UX? Right. This article is a great example for both: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aras/110846684099110476

I honestly don't know how most people surf on mobile.

I have Pi-hole and Firefox blocking ads, and even then... I still have to do some custom blocking just to read some content.
- If it weren't for reader mode, a lot of news sites would be unusable.
Firefox with uBlock Origin makes mobile usable, but I don't know how people use other browsers that don't allow extensions.

I agree with the article, but i hate the way the author just admits defeat at the end. "I hate everything about it! But i won't realistically leave. And actually you can keep doing it all, just let me hide hotels pretty please". Ugh.

I can't claim I've managed anything more, beyond periodically re-testing the alternatives, but i just hate to see it written., Feels like it undermines the whole argument when they make clear that Google will see no consequence.

The biggest hurdle for me, is that many businesses and other points of interest are missing in the alternatives. And if not missing, then useful data like opening hours, reviews, etc aren't there.

But i hate every moment i spend in Google Maps due to the advertising and bad UX, and I will jump ship as soon as something comes even close (on Android).

I get the impression Google is trying to transition Maps into a social media platform.

Damn that should crash and burn as G+ did.

I find it interesting that many of these complaints essentially boil down to: listen, I know you have vast amounts of data about who I am as a person, so why aren't you using this data effectively?

This is what I'm wondering about too, spez, but I figured you would know a thing or two about that...

My Google account has reached an age of maturity, but I'm order to watch 'sensitive materiaal' Google wants me to upload my ID. Which I'll never do.

Otoh, like with Netflix suggestions, wouldn't it be more scary if the recommendations actually started making sense?

Idk...the article starts with talking about the history of Google Maps, then talks about Apple's Maps, and then complains pretty much at what looks like desktop features based off the snapshot in the article. Maybe the setup is different on iOS vs Android?

When I use Google Maps in my car, it doesn't pop up all these different places...it asks me to input a destination, and then it gives directions. Granted, I don't use it to include walking or other forms of transportation. The CarPlay interface has options to find gas stations, hotels, restaurants, etc., yet it doesn't clutter the display with those when I'm in transit.

I'm in agreement that the desktop version has a lot of clutter, no doubt. As far as my experience, the mobile app doesn't have a lot of issues where I use it the most.

I'm certainly seeing the same issues on my android that the author writes about. Especially when you're just browsing and haven't keyed in a destination.

Google Maps is the last Google thing I rely really heavily on. I would love to be able to replace it with OSM but searching for places is far better on Google (admittedly, probably because they have more context for your search due to all the spying). I also rely a lot on Google reviews when I'm in a new place and just want to grab a coffee or a drink or something. Could probably use TripAdvisor for that though.

At least in m area, the reviews are almost useless. Except one DHL shop, every place has the typical U-shaped distribution typical for manipulation and/or bad sampling. Everything is simultaneously the worst and the best food.
- Nobody cares enough to review average food.

The version on my S5 is a quarter the size of the version on my XCover. Both give the same directions. The app ballooned to 4x the size for ads and features I have literally never used on the phone like street view and "explore".

The version on my near decade old phone is also snappier and uses less data because it isn't background loading a bunch of ads for me to tune out.

Most annoying thing for me is being unable to filter businesses out of my search results. I cannot tell you how many times I have been looking for coffee shops and had to scroll past dozens of gas stations that sell coffee. It's also a problem that I can't filter out fast food or massive chains. Yes Starbucks is a coffee shop, but if I want something small or local I'm shit out of luck on Google maps because they dominate my results.

This is such a simple feature for a SEARCH ENGINE COMPANY to implement but I'm sure they don't want to risk upsetting potential ad revenue by allowing users to filter out the advertisers business.

My biggest gripe is that it can't handle multi part trips with turn by turn directions. By that I mean - let's say I want to go across town to my destination and that involves using the subway that I need to walk to. For some reason Maps doesn't give you turn by turn walking directions to the subway part, but will show you the map with your location to the subway then to destination. You have to start and stop turn by turn directions to each part separately. That's such a pain in the butt and is nonsensical.

Really? It does that for me just fine. Maybe the subway movement data isn't properly uploaded to the Maps system?
- I'd love to see a video of it working. As far as I know, there is no way to do so. You cannot plan a trip that has public transportation and have it give you turn by turn walking directions to the pickup point, have it automatically turn off those turn by turn directions when you're on the public transport, then automatically turn the turn by turn walking dirrections back on when you're off the transport.
  
  It simply shows you the overhead map and tells you to walk to the transportation. It does not allow you to see turn by turn directions to the location when you've got a mixed mode of transport (walking and pubic transport).

Thankfully we have openstreetmaps.

Organic Maps FTW!

Hmm, I just tried a route and it looks like you're right, it draws it out but doesn't give you turn by turn. I could have sworn it does when I'm actually following it, but maybe not. I'll have to actually test it.

#6.) If you're using a browser that prevents fingerprinting (Firefox), road badges display as garbage in Google Maps.