Updates to Google Maps have been a bit quieter over the last few months as fewer features come to each update than we're accustomed to. A recent announcement revealed this time has been spent on some cool new predictive features that will help users find restaurants, events, and other places that match their taste and style. The first stage of those new features, scoring for places that match your tastes, is going live now. There are also signs of many of the other previously announced features, Waze-style incident reporting, and more.

What's New

Unofficial Changelog: (the stuff we found)

  • Match scores

Matches

Last month, the Maps team announced some of its upcoming features, including a brand new "Match" score that aims to help you find restaurants suited to your tastes. Matches are starting to roll out now for some people.

Your match score appears near the top of detail pages for places that serve food or drinks, just to the right of the average rating. The score is based on many factors like your known preferences, if you've visited similar places in the past, how you've rated a place, and so on. Tap on the score to see more details and get shortcuts to refine the information Maps has for making suggestions.

You can define the types of restaurants that appeal to you based on various categories like regional cuisine, which meals are served, and more. As you define more preferences and give ratings to places you've been, Maps will update your scores and provide new suggestions.

While the Match scores will appear on restaurant detail pages and suggestions resulting from the scores will appear in a couple of different places, you can also open the Settings screen to find a new section titled Exploring places. That's where you can change your preferences and see a list of places you've rated.

Match scores are still not widely available to everybody, but they are rolling out to people in at least a few different countries, so this isn't locked to the US.

UPDATE: 2018/06/27 12:20am PDT BY

Google officially announced that the score matches are rolling out to everyone along with the For You tab and the new Material look we covered earlier.

Thanks: Saul Herman and Alin Ali Hassan!

Teardown

Disclaimer: Teardowns are based on evidence found inside of apks (Android's application package) and are necessarily speculative and usually based on incomplete information. It's possible that the guesses made here are wrong or inaccurate. Even when predictions are correct, there is always a chance that products could change or may be canceled. Much like rumors, nothing is certain until it's officially announced and released.

The features discussed below are probably not live yet, or may only be live for a small percentage of users. Unless stated otherwise, don't expect to see these features if you install the apk. All screenshots and images are real unless otherwise stated, and images are only altered to remove personal information.

Incident reporting

One of the most frequently cited features of Waze is the ability to report different types of roadside events and points of interest for other drivers. It looks like incident reporting may finally be making its way to Google Maps.

New text includes three types of reports: Crash, Speed camera, and Speed trap. There is also text for vote up and down buttons and the obligatory warnings to only use the interface when it's safe to do so. Overall, there's very little text to look at, which makes sense for a feature most people will be using while they drive.

strings”]<string name=

Explore nearby events

The new Match scores weren't the only thing announced for Maps last month, there were quite a few others. The first one to discuss is a redesigned Explore tab. The upcoming changes aren't just visual, there will also be a big change in content. Users can look forward to top trending lists and interesting events in your area.

We've known that feature is coming, but now the resources are actually available when the time comes for a launch.

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It's notable that events can be added to your calendar directly from Google Maps, not that we should have expected otherwise. There will also be a feature for editing events, though it might only be available to the creator of an event.

The more interesting part may be some of the other types of things that may be added to the Explore tab. There appears to be a list of different settings that will allow you to filter what type of content will be visible. It looks like the current plans include lists of newly opened places, saved places, trending restaurants, and places the local foodies have gravitated toward.

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Group planning

Also mentioned in the Maps announcement was a group planning feature that enables creating sharable lists and having a group vote on a preferred destination. As it turns out, there's not much to look at for this one besides a title, so it's likely this won't be launching until the next version (or later).

<string name="GROUP_PLANNING_CATEGORY_TITLE">Group planning</string>

For you: Following areas and places

The final big new feature promised by Google is called "For You" – a tab dedicated to helping each person find places to go and things to do. For You seems to be more of a parent to most of the other features we've seen in that announcement, at least in the sense that things like Match scores and the other event-related things appear to feed into this tab.

Of course, the For You tab will contain all of those recommendations based on Match scores and various lists and suggestions, but there's a little more to it. Users will also be able to follow places and areas in almost the same way they follow somebody on Twitter. When you follow places and areas, you'll get articles and other updates those places change.

The setup for following an area appears to resemble the experience of setting up an offline map: You just move a piece of the map to fit within a box. If you don't want to hear about individual places within an area, you can manually hide them from showing updates.

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Prices tab

As the detail pages for businesses have grown, Google has been slowly moving whole sections into their own dedicated tabs. Depending on the place, you could have theoretically seen as many as seven tabs in that horizontally scrollable bar. In the latest update, that number goes to eight as a Prices title is added.

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I haven't been able to find a place with a tab for prices, but my best guess is that it's for businesses that charge an entry fee like a theme park or movie theater.

New notifications and channels

There is now text for a potentially new notification. It's titled "Familiar Places," but the description reads quite a bit like some of the existing contribution-related prompts that already exist. I tend to doubt this really differs from the ones that are already there, it may just be different wording in an A/B test to determine if different phrasing will get better results.

<string name="CARETAKERS_PENDING_EDIT_NOTIFICATION_OPT_OUT_TITLE">Familiar Places</string>

<string name="CARETAKERS_PENDING_EDIT_NOTIFICATION_OPT_OUT_MESSAGE">Help provide up-to-date info for places you might know</string>

<string name="CARETAKERS_PENDING_EDIT_NOTIFICATION_SETTINGS_TITLE">Familiar Places</string>

<string name="CARETAKERS_PENDING_EDIT_NOTIFICATION_SETTINGS_SUMMARY">You're getting questions about places you might know on Google Maps</string>

More sorting options for reviews

It's a really minor thing, but there will be two more options for sorting reviews: Most liked and Oldest.

<string name="CONTRIBUTIONS_REVIEW_SORTED_ACCESSIBILITY_ANNOUNCEMENT">Reviews sorted to %1$s</string>

<string name="CONTRIBUTIONS_SORT_BY_MOST_LIKED">Most liked</string>

<string name="CONTRIBUTIONS_SORT_BY_OLDEST">Oldest</string>

Download

The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.

Google Maps Developer: Google LLC
Price: Free
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