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Google Maps Go passes 500 million Play Store installs
It's a good indicator of Android Go sales figures
Android Go is designed for phones with limited resources and comes with a variety of apps, including Maps Go. The latter offers limited functionality compared to the main version, but doesn't require a lot of resources to run. The fact that it just passed 500 million downloads on the Play Store is a good indication of the platform's success.
The single largest omission present in Google Maps Go (and, in part, Android Go) was the lack of proper navigation support. If you tried to use the app to get turn-by-turn directions, you were pretty much out of luck, as it would just point you to the more fully-featured Google Maps app—basically defeating the purpose of a "maps" app, in my opinion. Well, Maps Go still can't do navigation, but Google has seen fit to break that functionality out into yet another Go app: Navigation for Google Maps Go.
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Google started a beta program for Google Maps Go—the lightweight low-data version of Google Maps—back in January, but at the time you couldn't actually install it on non-Go phones or in most countries. That was a bit disappointing; while the app itself might be nothing more than a shell for the PWA accessible via Chrome, it was still bound to come in handy as a shortcut for those on slower connections. Now Google has decided to let more of us in on the fun, as the beta program on Google Play has expanded to the US.
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- Maps Go finally opened up a beta program on the Play Store, which you can sign up for here. That means we were able to grab the teensy 0.09MB file and it's now up on APK Mirror for you to download and try. As suspected, the app runs in Chrome so it is a Progressive Web App and technically the same thing as if you'd pulled out a homescreen shortcut for its URL.
Android Go, the lightweight edition of Android made for low-end hardware, officially launched about a week ago, and promised to come with several optimized versions of apps to make better use of the limited resources. We've already seen Files Go and Google Go but the Android Go site says there are more apps, like Assistant, Gmail, and Maps. The latter has just showed up on the Play Store, though it may have been available for a while but invisible.