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Comment by jalk | Hacker News Reader

You can click the search icon while in navigation mode, to search along the route. It doesn’t work that great as you have to zoom to an aprox area and it seems somewhat arbitrary what comes up. It will show you how many minutes of detour a location would add, which is quite nice when choosing among a bunch

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Sometimes I don't know what I'm searching for, I just want to browse what kind of businesses exist in an area along my route to see if it's worth stopping there and taking a break. Also if I use the search feature it auto-zooms out the map and then I have to fight it within hundreds of milliseconds to get back to where I was on the map. Once it auto-zooms fully I may have trouble remembering where exactly along the route I was looking. I may have been searching for food near a particular weirdly-shaped lake along the route that I spent 15 minutes tracing the 500km route at max zoom to find. Once the search auto-zooms back out, my 15 minutes of "work" is instantly wasted and I can't find that lake again.

Well, first world problems for sure. Its free app, you have some extremely specific use-case (even though I have no doubt 100 HN users can post in response that they do exactly same thing, its still fringe overall) and the app doesn't suit that narrow situation that well...

Not surprised, we can come up with probably thousands of similar scenarios when some popular free tool ain't the smoothest to use for 'when I do this but want also that and while doing something else that isn't so well integrated into the flow something happens/doesn't happen but should' situation.

Maybe take a laptop and a mouse next time, 100x more efficient to use. Or use it in browser in tabs, so you can have 20 different locations/views and switch between them.

The search-along-route is more of a 'search-around-my-current position'. If you e.g. need fuel, it lists options for busy towns in the wrong direction rather than the easiest path along your current route. If you need a given RON or niche fuel, you just have to memorise which suppliers sell it & hope that it shows up in the list. The utopian vision that it could figure out the range of the car it's connected to and use this information to decide where would be most efficient to fill up is a pipe dream.

Using Maps while driving for anything other than A-B navigation is generally poor. It seems designed by people who are accustomed to every destination having plentiful dedicated parking. If you want to go to B, then find local parking, you need to invoke dark voodoo.

The worst part is that the Apple & Google duopoly in maps supported by Android Auto and Apple Carplay means there's no way for a superior alternative to succeed in the market. Google even contributed to this by buying Waze. So Maps only needs to be just good enough.

>The worst part is that the Apple & Google duopoly in maps supported by Android Auto and Apple Carplay means there's no way for a superior alternative to succeed in the market.

What does Android Auto and Apple Carplay have to do with it? Aren't both of them available for third party apps to use?

The Apple one is available, theoretically, though you have to specify each time to tell Siri to get directions with something other than Apple, and it also won’t support any features such as the useful “share ETA” which is a real shame. They also thankfully opened up their split-screen mode to third party navigation apps a couple years ago (though, incidentally, that screen is utter trash in my humble opinion because of what it doesn’t include).

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