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Comment by Urgo | Hacker News Reader

It's great they brought this back, but this is far from a new feature, just one that was gone for a few years. Previous to the redesign of the google maps app this feature did fully exist with navigation and all as I used it myself when visiting Canada. Anyway glad to see it back but how quick the Internet forgets.. this isn't new, they just fixed the broken feature, heh.

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You are mistaken. What existed before (and the redesign did not remove) was the ability to view cached data offline. You could specify a region to cache, then zoom and pan around that area without a data connection. It would also automatically download your route when you started navigation, and if you subsequently lost your data connection there was a limited offline ability to give directions back to the cached route.

What is new, and never existed before in any version of the app, is the ability to search and start navigation completely offline.

Absolutely wrong. Back in version 6, there was a "My Maps" feature which allowed you to save a region and use that saved region to navigate.

"My Maps" was and still is the name of a feature which allows you to add your own places, lines, etc. on top of the base Google map. It has never allowed you to search the base map or start turn-by-turn navigation offline.

As long as you had internet connection at the start of your journey it worked for navigation, even if you dropped offline during your trip. Therefore downloading maps was useful at the time because if you didn't do this, you could be driving blind for a while in areas where there was no internet connection. You could only download small sections of the map at 1 time for offline use (e.g. an area just bigger than Manhattan). Still it was a total PITA given that most other navigation apps at the time allowed you to download maps and start navigation even if you were offline. Of course, if you did that all the time Google wouldn't be able to collect data on you to support its business model, which is probably why they've taken so many years to get around to implementing this.

Offline maps have been supported for a while, but I used to work on Google Maps, and to the best of my knowledge offline navigation has never been supported before.

Catching up with the free open-source stuff that runs OpenStreetMap and routing plugins. That's pretty competitive.

Any specific suggestions?

Actually, it has still existed, just hidden. You could navigate to a part of the map, remove your search query. And you can save the map offline.

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